Would you describe a dying star as "bloated and gouty?" Caleb Scharf did and was called to task by a scientist who objected that stars can't be gouty because they don't produce uric acid. Scharf still defends the use of metaphors in science writing: "The simple truth is that scientists themselves constantly make use of analogies, metaphorical devices, and similes. Sometimes it’s the only way to build an intuition for a problem, by relating it to something else."
