The paper deals with the role of analogical and metaphorical thinking in the public communication of contemporary physics. We focus on the cognitive aspects: how to disseminate complicated formal physical concepts to a non-professional public maintaining the ‘correct’ disciplinary meaning (communication of ‘good physics’). To face the issue from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, we analyze the characterization of the generative aspect of ‘new’ meanings in the analogical and metaphorical use in order to evaluate the construction of ‘actual’ physical meaning. We investigate the research problem by analyzing a set of ‘relevant’ analogies and metaphors taken from popular science literature within the framework of conceptual metaphor. A case study is presented: Schrödinger's analogy for ‘elementary particle’.The results of the analysis suggest that the conceptual metaphor perspective might be a potential tool both to assess the quality of analogical forms used in dissemination of physics and to design new and ‘better’ analogies and metaphors. Besides, in a recursive process this analysis could help to focus on those meaningful cognitive aspects that characterize, and refine, a ‘complete’ and ‘correct’ physical conceptWe think that fruitful results of inquiry might come from a deeper interdisciplinary approach between linguistics and physics.