Aspects of Metaphor in Physics

Aspects of Metaphor in Physics

Author: Hanna Pulaczewska

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-05-03

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 3110915936

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With reference to copious case studies, this book attempts to give a broad and comprehensive view of the multiplicity of forms taken by metaphor in physics. A diachronic presentation of the views hitherto advanced on the role of metaphor in the natural sciences provides an introduction to the crucial issues. By means of a broad definition of metaphor as a lexical, semantic, and conceptual phenomenon, metaphor is identified at various levels of physics discourse: in metatheory and methodology; in the sociology of the origin and evolution of science; in theory and conceptualization, including physics models; in education; and finally in linguistic expression, including terminology. Whereas historians and theoreticians of science reduce the question of metaphor in physics to the question of the role of scientific models, where one area of physics provides concepts and structures for another area, the perspective adopted here is that of cognitive semantics. The study inquires into the way in which concept-formation and terminology in physics avails itself of the metaphoric bent immanent in everyday language, conceptualizing abstract ideas in spatial terms, inanimate things as intelligent, measurable phenomena in terms of the visual. Attention is also given to the way in which metaphoric processes make it possible to integrate new knowledge into old and sometimes obsolete structures rather than eliminating those structures altogether.


Physics and Literature

Physics and Literature

Author: Aura Heydenreich

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-12-20

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 3110481251

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Physics and Literature is a unique collaboration between physicists, literary scholars, and philosophers, the first collection of essays to examine together how science and literature, beneath their practical differences, share core dimensions – forms of questioning, thinking, discovering and communicating insights.This book advances an in-depth exploration of relations between physics and literature from both perspectives. It turns around the tendency to discuss relations between literature and science in one-sided and polarizing ways. The collection is the result of the inaugural conference of ELINAS, the Erlangen Center for Literature and Natural Science, an initiative dedicated to building bridges between literary and scientific research. ELINAS revitalizes discussion of science-literature interconnections with new topics, ideas and angles, by organizing genuine dialogue among participants across disciplinary lines. The essays explore how scientific thought and practices are conditioned by narrative and genre, fiction, models and metaphors, and how science in turn feeds into the meaning-making of literary and philosophical texts. These interdisciplinary encounters enrich reflections on epistemology, cognition and aesthetics.


How Metaphors Guide, Teach and Popularize Science

How Metaphors Guide, Teach and Popularize Science

Author: Anke Beger

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2020-04-22

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 902726144X

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Metaphors are essential to scientists themselves and strongly influence science communication. Through careful analyses of metaphors actually used in science texts, recordings, and videos, this book explores the essential functions of conceptual metaphor in the conduct of science, teaching of science, and how scientific ideas are promoted and popularized. With an accessible introduction to theory and method this book prepares scientists, science teachers, and science writers to take advantage of recent shifts in metaphor theories and methods. Metaphor specialists will find theoretical issues explored in studies of bacteriology, cell reproduction, marine biology, physics, brain function and social psychology. We see the degree of conscious or intentional use of metaphor in shaping our conceptual systems and constraining inferences. Metaphor sources include social structure, embodied experience, abstract or mathematical formulations. The results are sometimes innovative hypotheses and robust conclusions; other times pedagogically useful, if inaccurate, stepping stones or, at worst, misleading fictions. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.


Metaphor in Communication, Science and Education

Metaphor in Communication, Science and Education

Author: Francesca Ervas

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-08-07

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 3110549921

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This collection of papers presents some recent trends in metaphor studies that propose new directions of research on the embodied cognition perspective. The overall volume, in particular, shows how the embodied cognition still remains a relevant approach in a multidisciplinary research on the communicative side of metaphors, by focusing on both comprehension processes in science as well as learning processes in education.


Metaphor and Analogy in Science Education

Metaphor and Analogy in Science Education

Author: Peter J. Aubusson

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9781402038297

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This book brings together powerful ideas and new developments from internationally recognised scholars and classroom practitioners to provide theoretical and practical knowledge to inform progress in science education. This is achieved through a series of related chapters reporting research on analogy and metaphor in science education. Throughout the book, contributors not only highlight successful applications of analogies and metaphors, but also foreshadow exciting developments for research and practice. Themes include metaphor and analogy: best practice, as reasoning; for learning; applications in teacher development; in science education research; philosophical and theoretical foundations. Accordingly, the book is likely to appeal to a wide audience of science educators –classroom practitioners, student teachers, teacher educators and researchers.


Multimodal Metaphor

Multimodal Metaphor

Author: Charles Forceville

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 3110205157

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Metaphor pervades discourse and may govern how we think and act. But most studies only discuss its verbal varieties. This book examines metaphors drawing on combinations of visuals, language, gestures, sound, and music. Investigated texts include ad


Mathematics as Metaphor

Mathematics as Metaphor

Author: I͡U. I. Manin

Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0821843311

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Includes essays that are grouped in three parts: Mathematics; Mathematics and Physics; and, Language, Consciousness, and Book reviews. This book is suitable for those interested in the philosophy and history of mathematics, physics, and linguistics.


Cinematic Metaphor

Cinematic Metaphor

Author: Cornelia Müller

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-10-08

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 3110579782

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Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework’s application to media and multimodality analysis.