An example of a simile in science:
"The case of so-called frustrated total internal reflection, unaccounted for by geometric optics, is responsible for the phenomenon of evanescent light waves at the overlap of two transparent media. When light rays reflect within a denser medium (glass) and the medium is interrupted by a barrier of a less dense medium (e.g., air), they will not all reflect back and stay within the portion of the denser medium preceding the barrier. Wave optics suggests that a small portion of spherical waves will break into the air. Louise de Broglie realised early on that by analogy with light waves and the wave optics of refraction, matter-waves in a similar situation will penetrate into classically inaccessible regions of energy, with the energy of the resulting wave decreasing."
Perović, Slobodan (2017) Complementarity and quantum tunneling, in, Neils Bohr and the Philosophy of Physics. Twenty-first-century perspectives (Jan Faye & Henry J. Folse, eds.) Bloomsbury Academic: London, pp.207-222.
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The extract also discusses how scientific ideas can progress by analogy.
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