this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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To explain, I'm just a big old ignorant layman, but with other scientific fields I at least CONCEPTUALLY understand how they came to their findings.

Like if a Geologist tells me something about rocks I'm like: "Okay, idk how geology works, but I assume you did some kind of experiments involving rocks so you probably know what you're talking about."

Or if a neurologist tells me something about the human brain: "Okay, idk shit about neurology, but I assume you did some kind of brain scan or took some brain samples or did some kind of scientific experiment thingy to know this stuff about brains. I don't know the exact details but I can at least abstractly understand the process by which you learned this thing you're telling me now."

Then I'll see some news report about some finding a theoretical physicists made and it'll be like: "The Universe is made of strings! And also the sun is a black hole! The universe is shaped like a doughnut!"

And my honky ass is just like: "How the fuck do you know that shit? What are you looking at? How did you figure that crap out?"

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[–] SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip 1 points 2 days ago

At the risk of oversimplifying, the experimental branch of a field tries things to see what happens, while the theoretical branch takes those observations about the world and tries to explain why it's like that. They don't call it theoretical geology, because there's essentially no such thing as experimental geology, so it's redundant. (Ain't nobody got time to run an experiment that lasts a few million years, or funding to buy a test planet.) Geologists can mostly only try to explain what we can see about the Earth. In physics, it's the difference between bashing particles together to measure what flies off, versus figuring out why those particular things flew off.

They properly ought to be complementary, with the theorists coming up with new hypotheses for the experimentalists to test.