An interesting peek at how scientists think, and communicate, which helps the non-scientist in trying to decipher the often contradictory conclusions they reach.
An excerpt.
It's like this, you see
The ability to think metaphorically isn't reserved for poets. Scientists do it, too, using everyday analogies to expand their understanding of the physical world and share their knowledge with peers
Jul. 30, 2006. 01:00 AM
SIOBHAN ROBERTS
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
The poet Jan Zwicky once wrote, "Those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world."
Zwicky, whose day job includes teaching philosophy at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and authoring books of lyric philosophy such as Metaphor & Wisdom, from which the above quotation was taken, has lately directed considerable attention to contemplating the intersection of "Mathematical Analogy and Metaphorical Insight," giving numerous talks on the subject, including one scheduled at the European Graduate School in Switzerland next week.
Casual inquiry reveals that metaphor, and its more common cousin analogy, are tools that are just as important to scientists investigating truths of the physical world as they are to poets explaining existential conundrums through verse. A scientist, one might liken, is an empirical poet; and reciprocally, a poet is a scientist of more imaginative and creative hypotheses.
Both are seeking "the truth of the matter," says Zwicky. "As a species we are attempting to articulate how our lives go and what our environment is like, and mathematics is one part of that and poetry is another."
Analogies, whether in science or poetry, she says, are not arbitrary and meaningless, not merely "airy nothings, loose types of things, fond and idle names."
To bolster her thesis, Zwicky cites Austrian ethologist and evolutionary epistemologist Konrad Lorenz: "(Lorenz) has argued that, ok, yeah, we are subject to evolutionary pressure, selection of the fittest, but that means what we perceive about the truth of the world has to be pretty damn close to what the truth of the world actually is, or the world would have eliminated us. There are selection pressures on our epistemological choices." ...
Brian Greene, a Columbia University professor cum pop-culture physicist, has successfully translated the foreign realm of string theory for the general public with his best-selling book The Elegant Universe (1999) and an accompanying NOVA documentary, both replete with analogies to garden hoses, string symphonies, and sliced loaves of bread. As one profile of Greene observed, "analogies roll off his tongue with the effortless precision of a Michael Jordan lay-up."
Yet at a public lecture at the Strings05 conference in Toronto, an audience member politely berated physicists for their bewildering smorgasbord of analogies, asking why the scientists couldn't reach consensus on a few key analogies so as to convey a more coherent and unified message to the public.
The answer came as a disappointment. Robbert Dijkgraaf, a mathematical physicist at the University of Amsterdam, bluntly stated that the plethora of analogies is an indication that string theorists themselves are grappling with the mysteries of their work; they are groping in the dark and thus need every glimmering of analogical input they can get.
