A good analogy can make complex science understandable in moments.

You can (and should) use it when you are not sure whether your audience is familiar with a topic.

I recently read this analogy by Gregory Fridman explaining:
“Why do cold atmospheric plasmas stay cold if the electrons are at 1 eV?

A molecule has 4 degrees of freedom: rotation, vibration, translation, and electronic. Energy can go into any of them, and each behaves very differently.
Rotation: stand still and spin. Even at near light speed, nobody notices. Doesn’t heat the gas.

Vibration: jump in place. You bump your immediate neighbors, but that’s the extent of it.

Translation: run through the room, bumping into everyone. THIS is what “temperature” means to a human.

Electronic: sit calmly and start screaming. Everyone freaks out. This is where cold plasmas dump their energy.

Cold plasma works because we deliver energy almost entirely into the electronic degree of freedom.”

And I loved it. It makes such a difficult concept so much easier to understand.

Besides analogies, metaphors and comparisons also work great!

Do you use any of them in your scientific presentations to make complex topics easier for your audience to understand? If you don’t yet, can you think of any that could be useful 🤔 ?