Imagine a mathematical concept that approximates a particle across a spherical plane. Now imagine a force emitted from this sphere in a field. Okay, we’re ready to talk about why this is wrong, too.
One of my favourite things is the one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science”:
On Exactitude in ScienceJorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.
" …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."
Imagine a mathematical concept that approximates a particle across a spherical plane. Now imagine a force emitted from this sphere in a field. Okay, we’re ready to talk about why this is wrong, too.
There’s no analogy for any of this that doesn’t have some flaw.
All analogies have flaws. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be an analogy, they would be describing the very thing itself.
One of my favourite things is the one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science”:
Source: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf