Consider these two fields, gravitational waves as of just before Ligo. And rat nutrition. Gravitational waves is very much an area driven by simple (but mathematically difficult) formal theories, and a lack of data. Rat nutrition is a field with much easily accessible data, fairly easy to do experiments, but much more complexity. If you gave sociologists some magical ability to run lots of society scale experiments. (Maybe really good simulations, maybe a multiverse viewer) then the field still wouldn’t be physics. The most the sociologists could produce is huge tables of statistical correlations.
Consider these two fields, gravitational waves as of just before Ligo. And rat nutrition. Gravitational waves is very much an area driven by simple (but mathematically difficult) formal theories, and a lack of data. Rat nutrition is a field with much easily accessible data, fairly easy to do experiments, but much more complexity. If you gave sociologists some magical ability to run lots of society scale experiments. (Maybe really good simulations, maybe a multiverse viewer) then the field still wouldn’t be physics. The most the sociologists could produce is huge tables of statistical correlations.