An example of analogy used in popular science writing:
"…you can think of the the surface of a black hole's event horizon as covered in tiny tiles, each carrying one 'bit' of the information describing the entropy of everything that's fallen inside.
The mathematics shows that the event horizon's area grows the right number of tiles to encode every 'bit' of entropy that falls into the black hole. For a rough visual analogy, imagine a stream of oil pouring onto a sphere, coating it in a very thin layer. As more oil flows, the sphere expands by an amount which ensures that the oil layer remains infinitesimally thin. Similarly, to observers outside a black hole, objects don't appear to fall into it. Rather, they are smeared in a thin layer onto the event horizon."
Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.
Read examples of scientific analogies
[The 'tiles' are only a visualisation device – a visual simile? A metaphor?]
