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Albert Einstein
Mattress
Bill Bryson uses the metaphor of a mattress to explain the counterintuitive notion of spacetime in Einstein’s relativity theory. Most people imagine that space is a vast, empty region in which our solar system…
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Cathedral with a fly inside
When Bryson describes the structure of an atom, he uses the metaphor of a “cathedral with a fly inside” to illustrate the notion that the vast majority of an atom is empty space. The fly…
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Freeway
To help the reader realize just how perilous Earth’s orbit actually is, Bryson leverages the metaphor of a freeway to represent Earth’s orbit. Bryson describes the perpetual threat of meteors colliding with Earth and rendering…
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Rope Ladder
Bryson uses the metaphor of a rope ladder to help describe the structure of DNA and the mechanism of evolution. DNA has a double-helix structure—it looks like a twisted rope ladder. The rungs on the…
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