I believe they borrow results from fields that do have controlled experimentation, but they don’t have a great deal on their own—they concern the analysis of historical data, I believe. Unless “search this region of sky to see whether Planet X is there” counts as a controlled experiment.
I’m not an authority on any of these four fields, though—am I mistaken?
It’s a “controlled experiment” if there’s a sample which is used as a control. Whether that sample is under the control of the experimenter (or arises naturally) is a totally different issue:
I believe they borrow results from fields that do have controlled experimentation, but they don’t have a great deal on their own—they concern the analysis of historical data, I believe. Unless “search this region of sky to see whether Planet X is there” counts as a controlled experiment.
I’m not an authority on any of these four fields, though—am I mistaken?
It’s a “controlled experiment” if there’s a sample which is used as a control. Whether that sample is under the control of the experimenter (or arises naturally) is a totally different issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiment#Controlled_experiments
Fair enough—the author has changed the wording of the main article in any case.