April 1, 2018  A: Analog (One thing that is comparable to another. Perhaps, the same physical behavior, but at a different energy level).

 

 

The droplet experiment (The Experiment) presented here (The Union of Opposites Website) is an analog of the accretion disc of a star, which means the behavior is very similar to what happens as planets form around a sun. The experiment accurately predicts that smaller stars will produce smaller planets all of the same size (like the Trappist I Solar System with seven Earth-sized planets).

Another analog is the tension in a boundary between two fluids and gravitational tension in the universe. If we know what the formula for one universal behavior (ex: surface tension, curvature), we can guess at how another behavior (ex: gravitational tension, curvature) might operate. In this way analogs can be quite helpful in understanding the results of our experiments, especially in cosmological situations where it is impossible to run such experiments in the laboratory.