The True Untrue Stories We Tell

By Daniel Wicklund

“Let me tell you a story, to help you make sense of the world.”

Is there anything more ancient than the practice of storytelling? Well, yes, the Big Bang. And Quasars, certainly. Our Sun, the Earth. 

But we can’t get away from our storytelling nature, even in a science classroom devoted to objective facts and truth. Stories allow us to identify with content and create meaning. Without stories and the spaces between them, facts would not instruct, and would soon be forgotten. But the stories are never complete, and they never will be.

In A Different Universe, Nobel Laureate and physicist Robert Laughlin casually notes that “we reason by analogy.” At first, I wasn’t sure what he meant, but this phrase has stuck with me across the years, becoming ever more apparent with time. Analogies are the stories we tell to create sense out of facts. And while storytelling is clearly the domain of humanities teachers and grade school teachers, STEM teachers are sometimes less comfortable with it. We use analogies, but we are suspicious of them. In a modern-day classic comic strip, XKCD writer Randall Munroe depicts a teacher trying to teach students about General Relativity. “Spacetime is like this rubber sheet…” the teacher begins, but when a student questions the limits of the analogy, the teacher begins again: “Spacetime is like this set of equations…”

I used to try to explain electric circuits by referring to electrons as lazy hikers. Resistors are mountains, and voltage is like energy bars. The more mountains there are to climb, the fewer hikers will set out, and the higher the mountain, the larger the fraction of their available energy bars they will devour. But I gradually stopped using this analogy because it was imperfect. Do electrons have to start at the battery? Ouch. No. The hikers are evenly distributed along the trail. How do the hikers know the sizes of the mountains so that they can apportion their energy bars appropriately? Umm. Analogies always seem to tell less than the whole story. In fact, analogies seem to be patently untrue.

Physicist Richard Feynman offers untrue analogies for light, in his famous lecture “Probability and Uncertainty: The Quantum-Mechanical View of  Nature.” He first leads us down two paths: light is like bullets; and light is like water waves, before revealing that both analogies are untrue. Light, he says, “is like nothing you have ever seen before.” Except that electrons seem to have the same, strange behavior. Feynman notes that “they are both screwy, but in exactly the same way.” Yet even in describing a phenomenon that is essentially singular, Feynman resorts to analogies. Every analogy is limited in nature, and every story must fall short of the ultimate story. Even most sacred religious texts do not purport to tell the whole story, but instead offer glimpses and hints through the lives of individuals.

It is odd that we can only approach the truth through imperfection and understanding by way of untrue stories. But we can’t forget that what we are striving toward is something wholly other. In the words of Carl Sagan, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” We reason by analogy, and every analogy is necessarily untrue.

The Downtown School students have an energy and curiosity that makes teaching them so much fun. They want to know the stories, and they want to see their knowledge applied. They push us to give them the stories and then they poke holes in the stories, as they should. Because maybe part of what we’re teaching is not really what we think we’re teaching. Rather than simply teaching my students how electric circuits work, maybe the more subtle, oft-unstated goal is that we are teaching those in our care to create analogies and stories, by which they will make some sense of the world.