260910: Metaphors We Science By
Philip Ball, in 2024's We are not machines, writes:
The role of metaphor and narrative, as opposed to new theories or experiments, is too little recognised in discussions of the historian of science Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts... All scientists know how to go about scrutinising a theory: you use it to formulate some testable hypothesis, and then do the experiment. If the theory fails the test, that’s just the scientific method at work. But metaphors aren’t the kind of thing you test at all: there are no critical tools designed to challenge them. They become regarded merely as expressions of how things are: an invisible component of the prevailing paradigm.
Too often we think of metaphors and facts as opposite ends of an axis. But all language is metaphor, all language is fossil poetry. It has been my project for a while now to renovate the metaphors we use, the metaphors that hide beneath our abstractions and jargon and ten-dollar words. We believe ourselves oh-so-modern, wielding words like "ossification," but we are saying no more than a caveman who points at a bone.
Poetry has a role, then in science, and the greatest scientists have always been poets.