An example of scientific concepts used as metaphors,
"The most highly developed concepts of government in traditional Indonesia were those upon which the classic Hinduised states of the fourth to fifteenth centuries were built, concepts that persisted in somewhat revised and weakened form even after these states were first Islamicised and then largely replaced or overlaid by the Dutch colonial regime. And of these concepts the most important was what might be called the theory of the exemplary centre, the notion that the capital city (or more accurately the king's palace) was at once a microcosm, of the supernatural order – 'an image of …the universe on a smaller scale' – and the material embodiment of political order. The capital was not merely the nucleus, the engine, or the pivot of the state; it was the state."
Clifford Geertz (2000) Ideology as a cultural system (first published 1964), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. 2nd Edition. New York. Basic Books
