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                                                         WAR_AND_PEACE

Quoting from Tolstoy's
"War and Peace" (1865-1869):


Examples of metaphors using technical
subjects, comparing the human to the
latest in the technical and scientific      Comparing the familar
realm.                                      to the unfamiliar?


     No matter what he thought about, he
     always returned to these same
     questions which he could not solve
     and yet could not cease to ask
     himself.  It was as if the thread
     of the chief screw which held his
     life together were stripped, so
     that the screw could not get in or
     out, but went on turning uselessly
     in the same place.

       Book V, Chapter I, p.459 (WC)



     If many simultaneously and variously directed forces
     act on a given body, the direction of its motion
     cannot coincide with any one of those forces, but will
     always be a mean -- what in mechanics is represented
     by the diagonal of a parallelogram of forces.

        Book XII, Chapter VII, p.242 (WC)


     A lump of snow cannot be melted instantaneously.
     There is a certain limit of time in less than
     which no amount of heat can melt the snow.  On the
     contrary the greater the heat the more solidified
                                                         
        Book XIII, Chapter XIX, p. 281 (WC)                              
                                                                            
                                                                         
                                                 A nice try at a   
                                                 physical metaphor,
                                                 but the physics   
                                                 is wrong.         
                                                                  
                                                                  
                                     Tolstoy is probably thinking 
               He might              about the fact that phase    
               have be               changes take place at a fixed
               confused              temperature.  Slowly adding heat
               by personal           to an ice/water mixture will 
               experience:           not budge it over 32 degrees F;
                                     the energy of the heat entirely
               Warmer weather        goes into the phase change,
               at first              breaking atoms loose from the
               just results          crystalline form.  The
               in a coating          proportion of ice will
               of ice on the         gradually decline, and only
               snow, from            when the ice is gone, then the
               partial melting       temperature will start to rise.
               and refreezing.                                      
                                           This indeed could be used    
                                           in an analogy for initial   
                                           resistance to change, but    
                                           Tolstoy didn't quite get    
                                           there.                   
                                                                    

      ...  military science assumes the strength of an
     army to be identical with its numbers.  Military
     science says that the more troops the greater the
     strength.  ...

     For military science to say this, is like defining
     momentum in mechanics, by reference to the mass
     only: stating that momenta are equal or unequal to
     each other simply because the masses involved are
     equal or unequal.

     Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of
     mass and velocity.

     In military affairs the strength of an army is the
     product of its mass and some unknown x.

     [...]

     That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army [...]

         Book XIV, Chapter II, p. 288-289 (WC)



     To find component forces equal to the composite or
     resultant force, the sum of the components must equal
     the resultant. This condition is never observed by the
     universal historians, and so to explain the resultant
     forces they are obliged to admit, in addition to the
     insufficient components, another unexplained force
     affecting the resultant action.

        Second Epilogue, Chapter II, p. 495 (WC, text here GP)


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