On Metaphors VI

"Progress in truth - truth of science and truth of religion - is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Religion in the Making", 1926)

"Science advances metaphorically. It does not proceed in an orthogenic fashion moving inexorably forward in a straight line. It does not radiate along many branches like a growing tree. It moves from one view to another by a large leap, preceded by a radical shift in the scientist’s mode of thought." (François Jacob, "The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity", 1970)

"Clever metaphors die hard. Their tenacity of life approaches that of the hardiest micro-organisms. Living relics litter our language, their raisons d’etre forever past, ignored if not forgotten, and their present fascination seldom impaired by the confusions they may create." (James R Moore, "The Post-Darwinian Controversies", 1979)

"Metaphor, the life of language, can be the death of meaning. It should be used in moderation, like vodka. Writers drunk on metaphor can forget they are conveying information and ideas." (Robert Fulford, 1996)

"So much of science consists of things we can never see: light ‘waves’ and charged ‘particles’; magnetic ‘fields’ and gravitational ‘forces’; quantum ‘jumps’ and electron ‘orbits’. In fact, none of these phenomena is literally what we say it is. Light waves do not undulate through empty space in the same way that water waves ripple over a still pond; a field is only a mathematical description of the strength and direction of a force; an atom does not literally jump from one quantum state to another, and electrons do not really travel around the atomic nucleus in orbits. The words we use are merely metaphors." (K C Cole, "On Imagining the Unseeable", Discover Magazine, 1982)

"Metaphor and simile are the characteristic tropes of scientific thought, not formal validity of argument." (Rom Harré, "Varieties of Realism", 1986)

"[…] mathematics does not come to us written indelibly on Nature’s Tablets, but rather is the product of a controlled search governed by metaphorical considerations, the premier instance being the heuristics of the conservation principles." (Philip Mirowski, "More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics: Physics as Nature’s Economics", 1989)

"Today’s quarks and leptons can be viewed as metaphors of the underlying reality of nature, though metaphors that are objectively and rationally defied and are components of theories that have great predictive power. And that’s the difference between the metaphors of science and those of myth: scientific metaphors work." (Victor J Stenger, "Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses", 1990)

"[…] we see from these formulations how difficult it is when we try to push new ideas into an old system of concepts belonging to an earlier philosophy, or, to use an old metaphor, when we attempt to put new wine into old bottles. Such attempts are always distressing, for they mislead us into continually occupying with the inevitable cracks in the old bottles, instead of rejoicing over the new wine." (Werner K Heisenberg)