this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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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.