Fiction-Science Pattern Mapping

It is a trite saying that “analogies cannot be pushed too far,” yet they may be justifiably used to describe things for which our language has no words.

—Werner Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory

It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors.

—Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

How do we communicate science phenomena such as time dilation and quantum superposition, processes that range from perplexing to entirely counterintuitive? We do so with a tool that is not an instrument like a microscope, nor a machine like a particle collider, but a rhetorical device: fictionality.

Fictionality opens the door to confounding natural phenomena through a process of fiction-science pattern mapping. To fi-sci*, distil a science phenomenon into a pattern (a form, or shape), and locate the avatar of this pattern in fiction. When a form in fiction is analogous to a form in science, we can reason about the latter in terms of the former.

Though we encounter science without the assumption of fictionality that cloaks us when we read fiction, we carry over the pattern perceived in the story. Playfully accepting an incomprehensible situation in fiction opens our conceptual pathways to a similarly-patterned process in science. Think of it as biomimicry plus fiction: both bioinspired design and fi-sci leverage analogical reasoning to solve problems across disciplines.

Fi-sci pattern mapping suggests that our capacities to perceive strange and confounding scientific phenomena may turn on our experiences with fiction.

Explore a reel of fi-sci analogies: