The mother of all analogies

So… most of you know that I have an analogy for everything. I know that at least one of you is convulsing in giggles right now while pretending to let out a huge groan. (Oh get a grip already… you know who you are…) This one’s different, though. I promise.

Once, I was driving home on Highway 101 late at night. It was drizzling, and it was a torrent of really tiny raindrops as opposed to a few huge ones. It seemed like a thick, wet fog that perpetually covered my windscreen even with the wipers on. As I drove up the peninsula across city lines, there were areas with a fair amount of lighting, and areas with very poor lighting. In the darker patches, the rain on my windscreen was practically invisible, and I could see fairly clearly. However, when the lighting got better, visibility went down because of the translucence of the raindrops. I could barely see what was in front of me, because the water droplets on my windscreen seemed to reflect most of the light away.

Scientifically, this was intuitive, but philosophically, it somehow seemed fascinatingly unexpected and quirky. The presence of street lighting had actually been counter-productive to visibility in this case. I was sure that this would someday be a wonderful analogy for something or other. After all, light and darkness could be so easily and elegantly analogized to many things- knowledge and ignorance, truth and deception, happiness and misery, etc…

I pondered over this for a long time. In what context could “darkness” cause something to appear more lucid than “light” would? I experimented with several concepts, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not deliver a smooth, punchy analogy that I could apply the windscreen story to. Why was I having such a hard time assigning a philosophical context to an anecdote that seemed to be a perfect candidate for an analogy?

This frustration that I felt reminded me of how engineers have the tendency to form a hypothesis and then to design experiments around that hypothesis to collect data to support it. This tactic works for the more experienced engineers would have “superpowers” that enable them to figure out the right hypotheses right off the bat that the experiments would then proceed to support. This level of intuition comes with experience. Other engineers like me, who have not developed that level of intuition, have a much harder time proving their initial hypotheses, no matter how logical the hypothesis sounds. Personally, I have a really hard time moving away from my hypotheses even after my experiments turn out to be inconclusive. How can something that sounds so logical turn out to be so hard to prove? Over time, I have learnt to let go of my technical hypotheses that I can’t prove at work and open my mind up to new hypotheses and solutions. Maybe it is now time for me to let go of my obsession with trying to fit every natural phenomenon into an analogy. The rules of optics surrounding rain on windscreens shall be the first to escape the need to feature in one of my analogies.

Last week, I was on Highway 101 once again when I noticed the reflectors that helped drivers see the lane markings better at night. However, during the day, those reflectors were nearly invisible. What did I learn from that? Not much. I’ll just keep this in mind in case I get to design highways someday.