Carel E. Cleland: Article Analysis

The article we read of rour third discussion was by Carel E. Cleland, and it was about the similarities and differences between historical and experimental science and why one is not any better than the other. I enjoyed reading the article as a whole, but I didn’t necessarily find the concept all that interesting. To me it wasn't necessarily a new idea that both of these forms of science are informative and important in their own way, but I did greatly appreciate hearing her reasoning behind this belief and the evidence she provided supporting it.

In the introduction, Cleland explained the dominance of experimental methods throughout society's view of science. When reading this, I definitely understood and realized what she was talking
She looks at a number of different aspects of the two, one of which is lab worked performed by the both. I guess I didn’t really ever think much about historical scientists doing lab work, but Cleland really demonstrated how it works and gave great examples such as carbon dating and the Urey Miller experiment. She explained that the main laboratory focus for historical scientists is analyzing and sharpening traces so that they can be identified and properly interpreted because to analyze events by experiment would require a far too long of time frame and test conditions that are way to complicated to be replicated.This is opposed to the main laboratory practice of experimental scientists which is to investigate auxiliary assumptions under specified conditions, which can semi-easily be created and replicated. A second, very important difference between experimental and historical science is the way they think about testing their various hypotheses. Good historical science researchers begin by formulating multiple competing hypothesis to explain a phenomenon or an event based on known data and observation. Then, they search deeper and deeper until they find a smoking gun, which is a piece of evidence that obviously sets one hypothesis above all the others. One example Cleland uses to demonstrate this point in the search for what killed the dinosaurs. The researchers on this topic had a number of different hypothesis, but they were unable to settle on a specific one until they discovered shocked quartz in the K-T boundary. This evidence could one be explained by on hypothesis, and that was that it was the impact of a meteor on the Earth that probably rendered the dinosaurs to extinction. Cleland greatly stresses the fact that a “smoking gun” may take decades or even centuries to discover because in many cases we would not have discovered them without the help of