Metaphors for Understanding Science

It is a loom, but for weaving equations.

Many of the concepts in genes apply to ideas, including cross-breeding, safe-sex, inbreeding, and species.

Donald Hoffman on how our sensory perception of the world is like a computer desktop, a representation of things, not how things actually are. We must remember the difference.

It is Darwin's theory, but a story told from the gene's point of view.

Each new exposure layers onto the old, with echoes of the old still faintly visible. The Universe shares this characteristic over time.

But unlike a detective novel, they can't flip to the last page and they may not even find an answer.

Quoting Sir Martin Rees: Learning the moves is the beginning, but there is still much to learn about the strategy.

And look what has been written with just a hundred words.

With the flakes it picks up being circumstances that amass onto it.

You will strike a new idea somewhere.

In a house 70 years old, but it is only three days old, and starting to see the house around it.

Like drawing two strokes on a clay tablet.

A great example concerning human physiology.

We must satisfy ourselves with metaphors.

Like spreading thorns.

To inspire ways to extend the analogy.

Categorizing them into workers in a factory.

We must work to extend the patches of light, according to Denis Diderot.

As a designer of garments for unknown beings, who delights in learning their shape as they go.

Krauss explains the principle using waves.

It's many features the weathering on it's face and its scars.

The smaller pieces you smash it into, the more specific the classification. TODO: I don't understand the "4 inches" part at the end concerning sub-species.

It is an incredible feat, but there is nothing wrong with sitting in the valley and watching the sun come up over it.

A great thought-experiment that takes us all the way back to when our ancestor was a fish, but shows us that the neighbors of any ancestor looked identical.

Just as there is no single flat map that can describe the Earth's surface, M-Theory is a collection of models that describe the laws of our Universe.

Eventually a planet ball has gathered up all the snowflakes in the surrounding area.

Scientists work like ants, spiders, and bees.

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.

Cells divide and fold into new forms, just as origami structures become other structures through new folds.