David Reed has written an insightful insightful short piece on the limitations (and inevitability) of scientific metaphors. For example:

Most radio engineers work in a particularly inapt metaphor – but they don’t know it. That metaphor still includes the essence of the idea called the luminiferous aether (except they call it the “spectrum”). The metaphor includes the idea that a “bit” is a unit of energy (rather than what Shannon defined it to be – which is something that represents correlated probabilities among parts of a system). This confuses the thing (bit) with one possible instance of the thing (a coded pattern of energy or matter).

Communications regulators work in an even more inapt metaphor…

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