The weirdest thing about 20th century science is quantum mechanics. You know, light is a wave and a particle at the same time, sort of. Or electrons aren't any one place 'til you look for them, sort of.

Everything's all fuzzy and based on chance at the atomic level, just like it is on every other level. Nothing is fixed. Nothing's completely determined.

The weird part is not so much the content of quantum mechanics, but rather the fact that there are no metaphors for how it works. I need metaphors and similes to get a handle on something, but quantum mechanics doesn't fit into any metaphor. It's sometimes one thing, sometimes another.

And it seems fairly alone as being beyond useful metaphor. Even the working of the mind appears describable in metaphor:

The mind is a stew in a cauldron.
It boils and bubbles with the heat energy of life.
In the stew are bits of vegetables and meats­ the individual memories.
These chunky memories flavor the entire mental broth.
The surface of the stew contains the meat and vegetables you can see now ­ consciousness.
You can focus on a part of the surface,
or take in the whole surface in one gaze.
You have a wooden spoon ­ intellect.
When you want to remember something, you just stir the stew 'til it surfaces.
Some chunks have been cooking for so long that most of it has dissolved into the mental broth.
It takes many stirrings with the spoon to get it to come to the surface.
You can pick up individual memories with the spoon and study them.
Perhaps sex is carrots.
Perhaps vocation is onions.
All work and no play makes onion soup.
Not so bad, but different from a full-bodied stew.

And if your life is a big cooking pot,
then the supreme universal ­ what some people personify by calling God ------ is . . .

Actually, God is everything. It's not some being, some guy with a nasty temper and a weird sense of black humor. God is you, me, and the trees; the dirt, the bombs, and the stars; crap, prison bars, and prisoners ­ all humming and shuffling along in the direction we think of as time.

Well, even that doesn't say how big God is. It's beyond metaphor. No description gives you a view of the whole thing. There is no view of the whole thing. Words are discrete units, they can never be strung together to do any more than point in the general direction of God. (Which we all know is up.)

Metaphor is the best technique we have of understanding something.
And it doesn't work on the really neat things.