Science as a cultural institution: The role of metaphors
September 7, 2013
I have recently discovered some (old) books written by Jacob Bronowski, scientist and science communicator, which are a real joy to read. I wrote a blog post based on them where I explored issues around science and values; I also promised to write something about his views of metaphor. Finding likenesses For Bronowski science and …
More heat than light? Climate catastrophe and the Hiroshima bomb
August 14, 2013
There has been some discussion on Twitter today (14 August) about the wisdom or otherwise of measuring the heat being retained by the Earth in terms of Hiroshima bombs. The analogy is presented by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli on their Skeptical Science blog, drawing on an academic paper by Church et al to describe the heat …
When the mundane becomes threatening: Raising the alarm about antibiotic resistance
March 24, 2013
I have recently written a blog post about the use of the word ‘alarmism’ in the context of current climate change debates, where the word is used to describe those who write and talk about an impending climate catastrophe. Today I want to write about another type of discourse that is alarming but has not …
Abseiling down the climate cliff metaphor
December 17, 2012
Since its very beginning in the 1980s, public discourse about climate change has been structured by metaphors. We had the greenhouse effect, the carbon footprint, the hockey stick, the tipping point, and we also had climategate; and to these metaphors we can now add the ‘climate cliff’ (which one can almost see as an upside …
Metaphor, image and now visualisation: Darwin’s tree of life
October 22, 2012
Yesterday (October 22, 2012) I came across this tweet: “Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins Zooming into the Tree of Life. Magnificent piece of software, brilliantly intuitive visualisation of the tree of life http://bit.ly/PJyox3 Retweeted by Eric Sawyer” This led me to a fascinating interactive and fractal representation of the tree of life (or phylogenetic tree or evolutionary …
Making science public: The issue of language (jargon)
August 1, 2012
This is a guest blog by Gregory Hollin, a PhD student at the Institute for Science and Society (School of Sociology and Social Policy) Over recent days there has been a fascinating blog-based debate of great interest to the Making Science Public agenda. This debate focused on the nature of writing in the natural and …
Metaphors in science and society
July 29, 2012
I recently had an interesting twitter conversation with Alex Brown (@alex_brovvn), Peter Broks (@peterbroks), Bev Gibbs (@bevgibbs), Angela Cassidy (@ange_cass) and Sophia Collins (@sophiacol) about metaphors for the spread of knowledge and for science communication. I also read two interesting blog posts related to that conversation, one by Peter Broks and one by Alex Brown. …
When the limits of our knowledge collide with the limits of our language: Mixing metaphors around the Higgs Boson
July 22, 2012
I was sitting in the garden today (in the sunshine!) (Sunday, 22 July), reading the feedback page of New Scientist which featured some amusing metaphors and analogies for the Higgs Boson, which has recently been discovered at CERN. This made me think. Science and metaphors Metaphors and analogies are used extensively in science, both in …
MSP bookmarks
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- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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