Analogies are useful for analysis in unexplored fields. By means of analogies an unfamiliar system may be compared with one that is better known. The relations and actions are more easily visualized, the mathematics more readily applied, and the analytical solutions more readily obtained in the familiar system.

In: John N. Shive and Robert L. Weber - Similarities in Physics - Chapter 3 (p. 24), John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1982