Abstract

Scientific Models. On the most primitive level of scientific popularization, common sense analogies are omnipresent, and are indispensable to layman and popularizer alike. Reichenbach's discussion of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle--in terms of a police car's inevitable effect on the speed of traffic--is a nice example. "In our intercourse with electrons we cannot don civilian clothes; when we watch them we always disturb their traffic." In this or any other such use of metaphor, however, the purpose is merely illustrative, and in an extremely naive or vague sense at that. The structural form A:B::C:D is clearly present, but the repeated ratios are of such a superficial, inexact and limited nature that no further inferences can be drawn from the one side of the proportion to the other. Only a familiarizing picture, helpful to the layman but fairly useless to the scientist, has been introduced. Still, it is also important to realize that the difference between the metaphorical popularization of science and the creative use of metaphor by scientists themselves is a difference in degree only, not of kind.