An example of metaphorical language in popular science writing:
"…the general field of stars is really a superposition of many disrupted stellar families – each disintegrating star group contributes a new family…
Once the clusters have separated we mostly find ourselves in the position of the King's men – we can't put them together again … But very recently O. J. Eggen has indeed succeeded in identifying members of several very large old families."
Fred Hoyle (1960) The Nature of the Universe (Revised ed.)
The 'families' are metaphorical (like suggesting the molecules of water within one raindrop are a family),
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Many examples of science metaphors are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.
The 'position of the King's men' is presumably a reference Hoyle assumed would be familiar to all his readers: from when "all the King's men" could not put Humpty Dumpty together again, after he shattered on falling off a wall. (This will be a very obvious reference to many, but may seem obscure to some readers if not familiar with Lewis Carrol's story of Alice through the Looking Glass ('Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There'.)
When Hoyle writes "we can't put them together again" he presumably does not mean the obvious point that we do not have technology that allows us to rearrange stars in space, but rather intends this figuratively – that is, that often (cf. the work of Eggen), we cannot even work out which isolated stars were previously in the same cluster.
