Model
A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin modulus, a measure.
Models can be divided into physical models (e.g. a model plane) and abstract models (e.g. mathematical expressions describing behavioural patterns). Abstract or conceptual models are central to philosophy of science,[1][2] as almost every scientific theory effectively embeds some kind of model of the physical or human sphere.
In commerce, "model" can refer to a specific design of a product as displayed in a catalogue or show room (e.g. Ford Model T), and by extension to the sold product itself.
A physical model (most commonly referred to simply as a model but in this context distinguished from a conceptual model) is a smaller or larger physical copy of an object. The object being modelled may be small (for example, an atom) or large (for example, the Solar System). In some sense, a physical model "is always the reification of some conceptual model; the conceptual model is conceived ahead as the blueprint of the physical one", which is then constructed as conceived.[3]
The geometry of the model and the object it represents are often similar in the sense that one is a rescaling of the other; in such cases, the scale is an important characteristic. However, in many cases the similarity is only approximate or even intentionally distorted. Sometimes the distortion is systematic (e.g., a fixed scale horizontally and a larger fixed scale vertically when modelling topography of a large area, as opposed to a model of a smaller mountain region, which may well use the same scale horizontally and vertically, showing the true slopes).
Physical models allow visualization, from examining the model, of information about the thing the model represents. A model can be a physical object such as an architectural model of a building. Uses of an architectural model include visualization of internal relationships within the structure or external relationships of the structure to the environment. Other uses of models in this sense are as toys.
