On analogies

I like finding parallels between different activities that I am involved in, e.g. fluid mechanics research, photography, martial arts, etc. It seems that many people enjoy finding analogies of whatever they do with other areas of life, particularly those that seem important to them.

Whether these parallels are useful, is a different question, though. I have read an autobiographic story by Richard Feynman about an episode from his student years, when he was asked to draw parallels between poetry and theoretical physics. He did that, but pointed out that the world is full of such similarities, and therefore dwelling on them is meaningless:

“Then I said, ‘It seems to me that no matter what you say about poetry, I could find a way of making up an analog with any subject, just as I did for theoretical physics. I don’t consider such analogs meaningful.”

Personally, I think the “analogs” are useful from the point of view of extending our experience in one area into other, unrelated fields. Of course, any two fields only seem to be unrelated. After all, the very fact that the same person attempts to deal in them makes them similar in that respect. So it not surprising that we can find parallels between any two subjects. Needless, to say, that in doing so, we ignore the differences, so it is indeed meaningless to say that poetry and physics, kendo and teaching, raising children and gardening, etc. are the same.