Especially like bringing up the hydraulic example.
I was reacting to a common trope on HN to react harshly to any type of metaphor about the brain.
When, where is the outrage when describing 'voltage' as a type of 'water pressure in a hose'. As you say, it is only accurate to a degree.
Like giving a presentation on 'cloud' computing, and the power point has clouds, and some cohort of IT people are seething in the back of the room, "those aren't really clouds, they are servers".
Guess that is the problem, all analogies are only accurate to some degree, or else they would be the original. Nothing can be fully explained by something else, without both models being the same. So at some point, analogies are just helpful to communicate some concepts, but are not complete.
Yet, having something 'similar' can help get over some hump in understanding the 'new thing'.
That link is pay walled, do you have another copy?
Got it.
Nice.
So you are talking about taking this concept of 'analogies' to the extreme of an actual physical 'analogy' that can be studied. Here acoustics, to mimic the event horizon (i'm simplifying).
This is pretty extreme case. I was just saying generally, that metaphors and analogies can help explain concepts. This is finding actual real correspondence between different 'model's.
Were you saying earlier that there was a way to model this correspondence between models generally, for other cases? Maybe there is a category theory or something, to relate different models, so they can be analogies of each other, but both real so can have experiments?
I'm not thinking of anything as formal as that, more in terms of trying to get a handle on the difference between the words in ordinary language.
Metaphors, analogies and models often help us understand things, but they can mislead unless they are, to a reasonable degree, models of the thing we we are trying to understand. The physicist Matt Strassler calls the latter 'phibs', and has written a recently-published book motivated by one in particular, an attempt to explain the relevance of the Higgs field. https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field...
Yes, this is good article showing the downsides of analogies. Thank You.
Interesting that while critiquing the common analogy, it did suggest another one.
I wonder if the problem isn't analogies, it is just finding 'good ones'.
"As an analogue, consider air pressure (which is itself an example of an ordinary field.) Air is a substance; it is made of molecules, and has density and weight. But air’s pressure is not a thing; it is a property of air, , and is not itself a substance. Pressure has no density or weight, and is not made from anything. It just tells you what the molecules of air are doing.
The Higgs field is much more like air pressure than it is like air itself. It simply is not a substance, despite what the phib suggests."
> When, where is the outrage when describing 'voltage' as a type of 'water pressure in a hose'. As you say, it is only accurate to a degree.
I was a bit sloppy in distinguishing model and analogy. I guess I meant physical analogy like pressure/voltage (which does outrage me!) vs model being an abstract description of the phenomenon built from the ground up, and was thinking in the context of physics or engineering.
The problem with the "bad" kind of analogies/models is they come with a list of conditions under which they don't apply, which is huge and usually not specified at all. For the "good" kind (Ohm's law/etc.), they come with a list of conditions under which they do apply which is finite and explicitly stated along with the equations so you can actually know if the model correctly describes a particular case.
Especially like bringing up the hydraulic example.
I was reacting to a common trope on HN to react harshly to any type of metaphor about the brain.
When, where is the outrage when describing 'voltage' as a type of 'water pressure in a hose'. As you say, it is only accurate to a degree.
Like giving a presentation on 'cloud' computing, and the power point has clouds, and some cohort of IT people are seething in the back of the room, "those aren't really clouds, they are servers".
Guess that is the problem, all analogies are only accurate to some degree, or else they would be the original. Nothing can be fully explained by something else, without both models being the same. So at some point, analogies are just helpful to communicate some concepts, but are not complete.
Yet, having something 'similar' can help get over some hump in understanding the 'new thing'.
That link is pay walled, do you have another copy?