A day is like a life.
Dr. Ian Malcolm uses this comparison when he is trying to explain chaos theory. Just as a day can start out with plans to do one thing and wind up with that one thing being the most important thing that didn’t get done in the face of a dozen less important things getting done, so does life tend to become a chaotic miasma rather than a sturdy bridge over the swamp below. Chaos theory is all about expanding outward from the minimal to the maximum and his comparison put that reality into perspective.
Pool ball
The pool ball being hit by the cue and caroming off other balls and banking off the sides of the table becomes a metaphor for the way that that chaos theory works. Even the most seemingly predictable effects of a single consequence are in fact utterly held hostage by chance and randomness.
Like a bird
Jurassic Park was the first exposure to most people outside the world of science to the concept that extinct dinosaurs may be related to modern day birds. Several times throughout the novel the actions or behavior or physique of a dinosaur is compared to something that is like a bird.
A born showman
The lawyer, Gennaro, reduces Hammond to a stereotypical metaphor, but it is worthy and important. Hammond is no scientist and he’s not even a businessman. He’s a huckster, a snake oil salesman. Of course, the metaphor is woefully inadequate: showmen are not born; they are made.
Like the snort of a very large horse
The simile is the best friend of the writer faced with describing to his readers something that nobody anywhere has ever heard or seen before .Most people can recognized what the snort of a horse sounds like even if they have only heard it on TV or at the movies. When describing the sound dinosaurs make the writer is forced to choose between two paths: onomatopoeia or similes. Throughout the book, Crichton continually shows a preference for the latter.
