How Culture Influences Scientific Metaphors

If you believe the cosmos is made up of omelette, you build instruments specifically designed to find traces of intergalactic yolk. In that paradigm you reject phenomena like pulsars and black holes as paranormal garbage. In an omelette cosmos, the beginning of the universe becomes a chicken and egg problem, doesn’t it?

Now, this definition of terms (like omelette universe) happens all the time. The reason that we today refer to electricity in terms of current is because in the eighteenth century people like Ben Franklin thought it was a fluid and tied all their experiments to that so-called fact. At the same time, in the eighteenth century, they thought all disease was caused by bad smells. Malaria is mal aria-bad air. We laugh at that, but for them, as for everybody at any time, the contemporary view of things is always the horse’s mouth.

Electricity has a current because Franklin thought it flowed like water, mal-aria is named after "bad air" because people thought it was caused by that, and we define the Universe it terms of clockwork or information depending on the cultural innovations of the time.