Stacked to reach beyond the moon. 30 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb. The weight of 2 SUVs on a postage stamp. These are only a few of the offbeat similes that scientists love to use in comparison to their work. But to anyone who has been published in a scientific journal, I must ask you the same question everyone asks me: where oh where do you get your ideas?
Science-Education Research, the website of Professor Keith S. Taber, is one of the few resources that discusses the strange disease that makes scientists compare their greatest findings to how many matchboxes you can put in a car. But even that site overlooks the thought process behind the average scientific article. Let’s say you need a cool way to tell kids that the average cumulus cloud weighs around 1 million tonnes. That linked website compares cloud mass to “three times the weight of the Empire State Building.” But why buildings? Why not say instead, “a single cloud is heavier than the Taj Mahal” or “that’s the weight of 270,000 gorillas?” What makes a researcher say “Nah, a cucumber metaphor would be misleading, the general public would better understand my work if I equate it to a dildo?”
Scientific discovery requires creativity, so I’m surprised there’s so much advice about how to bolster creative fiction writing, but little acknowledgement of creativity in nonfiction writing. Even Taber’s website talks about quotidian comparisons solely on page 35 of a 500-page PDF. There’s basically no literature online about how to convert your research into silly imagery. If you’ve ever used a scaling analogy in a scientific paper, sound off in the comments: what made you choose one relation over another? Did you struggle to pick the perfect example? Was the process tougher than 52 trillion tortoise shells, or simpler than breathing 78% Nitrogen with one inhale?