What happened when a pair of musicians decided to make a concept album about moths?

It sounded really weird to me, but the more I looked at these incredible creatures, I just was blown away.

It's Tuesday, October 22nd, and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm SciFri producer Deep Petersmith.

You might not have thought about it before, but humans, in a sense, go through a lot of the same stages of life that moths do, migration, emergence, emulation, while a pair of musicians

discovered these connections during lockdown in 2020 and created

the Moth Project, a concept album and stage show that combines songs of a whole ecosystem of

genres, including 80s pop, funk, and classical. And they learned that we have a lot more in common

with Moths than you might think. We'll have that story a bit later, but first here's Science

Fridays, Kathleen Davis and John Dinkowski talking about how metaphors can help and hurt understanding of science.

Here at SciFri, we're big fans of metaphors. They can help make complicated science concepts easier to understand, both for the public and for scientists themselves.

Take, for example, the Big Bang. That helps us visualize

the beginning of the universe. Or we can understand amino acids as the building blocks of proteins.

But as our next guests have shown, these scientific metaphors can also have a dark side,

and they can even set research back.

Sam Hartnett and Chris Hoff are the hosts of the podcast series The World According to Sound,

and they're here to tell us about their new project, an inexact science. It's a special two-hour

episode that explores how language and metaphor have shaped science, for better or for worse. Here's Cyfry's John Dancosky. Sam Hartnett and Chris Hoff. Welcome back to Science Friday. Good to have you guys here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, nice to be here. Okay, so first of all, why did you want to do a series about language in science history. I mean, what gave you this idea?

Yeah, I think it's, uh, what appealed to me is that a metaphor seems on its surface like the

most unscientific thing, right? I mean, when you hear metaphor, you think about poetry. And it's a,

by nature, kind of an imprecise way of expressing things. But when you look back at the history of

science, metaphors are

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