An exmple of an analogy used in public science discourse:
"We can test our theories, not only because we understand the physics, but because we can look at lots of stars. It is rather like if you had never seen a tree before, and you wandered around in a forest for a day, you can infer the life cycles of trees, you'd see saplings and big trees, etcetera. And so even though our lifetime is minuscule compared to the lifetime of a stable star, we can infer the population and life cycles of stars observationally and the theory does corroborate that fairly well."
Prof. Martin Rees
Prof. Martin Rees (University of Cambridge), the Astronomer Royal, was talking on an episode ('The death of stars') of BBC's In Our Time. Read 'The complicated social lives of stars'.
This analogy reflects one used by William Herschel in 1789: heavens resemble a luxuriant garden.
Read examples of scientific analogies
