In The Language of Science by Carol Reeves, she discusses metaphors in science in unit two and how they are an important part of everyday life. We constantly use metaphors in our daily lives and we have become so accustomed to them that we fail to realize how heavily we rely on them. We use metaphors consciously and unconsciously every day to describe the indescribable. They help us express feelings we cannot describe so we relate them to another experience. However, metaphors are imperfect. They fail to completely describe the events and never tell the whole truth. Sometimes metaphors make dreary situations seem brighter, or they make us feel comfortable with what is going on in the world. Metaphors are used in science as frequently as they are used in daily life. According to Reeves, scientists can use metaphors to help explain scientific information to the common man, to help model processes, to…show more content… This is the case for many scientific processes such as drawing molecules and describing natural phenomena (Reeves 27). Metaphors can sometimes become theories as well. According to Reeves, scientific theories created by scientists often start as metaphors that were chosen to help explain their ideas. A very famous example of a model beginning as a metaphor is the plum pudding metaphor (Reeves 29). The plum pudding metaphor was proposed by J.J. Thomson and it helped explain the distribution of negative and positive charges in an atom to those who had no background in science (Reeves 29). Obviously, the distribution of atoms is not really plum pudding, but the common person knew what plum pudding was, so it was an effective metaphor to use to describe such a complex process. This is an example of scientists using a metaphor to explain a complex process to non-scientists. It helped the common person understand the process by relating it to something they knew
