Arguing that scientific facts and insights can be used analogically to clarify literary analysis at specific moments, this paper presents a number of such facts and their analogical relationship to several literary passages. The examples cited relate the first and second laws of thermodynamics to scenes from "King Lear," rigid bodies in motion to passages from "Moby Dick" and "Huckleberry Finn," elastic collisions to scenes from "Hamlet," and the growth of snails to passages from "A Farewell to Arms" and "To the Lighthouse." (FL)