What controls and experiments can you do in astronomy?
The scientific method is a thin veneer best left at in the high school curriculum where it belongs. Actual science is vastly more messy and interesting.
You can figure out that there is no luminiferous aether between the planets with an interferometer. You can observe that the light of distant stars is bent by the sun's gravity during an eclipse. You can check that the planets appear in the sky where your celestial mechanics predict them to be. You can find out what elements the stars are made of with a prism.
The rest of those are not experiments, they are descriptions of natural phenomena we have no power of repeating. Which goes to show that you can have a science that does not have experiments but does have observations.
We clearly have different definitions of "experiment". Having a theory (e.g. light is affected by gravity), making a prediction (that star that should be behind the sun will be visible) and then doing an observation fits my definition of experiment. It's more difficult to reproduce that measuring the speeds of falling apples, but eclipses are not that rare and you can always come up with other predictions from you theory and do the corresponding observations.
I would rather argue that we can in fact do experiments in economics as well. It's just harder to draw conclusions from the observations because there are lots of variables you can't control for easily.
Then you've never done real science. The term science has become watered down. People confuse the words science and research and think they mean the same thing. They are not. Science is how we verify that reality operates according to how we believe it does. It is the gold standard. It requires more work than just research
Done enough to have an MSc in experimental particle physics.
But do you have a point that isn't a personal attack?
>Science is how we verify that reality operates according to how we believe it does.
Drop a feather and bowling ball together. Feather drops last. Law of gravity proved wrong.
Science is the removal of the incidental qualities of a phenomenon until only the essential qualities are left. What is incidental and what is essential depend completely on the context.
> The scientific method is a thin veneer best left at in the high school curriculum where it belongs.
Are you seriously belittling the scientific method. It's the central idea within real science.
> Actual science is vastly more messy and interesting.
Actual science relies on the scientific method. Pseudoscience ( like economics, psychology, social "science" ) do not rely on the scientific method.
The problem with economics is that it isn't predictive and testable. That's why you cannot scientifically test capitalism vs communism. Economics is a religion where you worship a prophet ( such as Adams or Marx ) rather than produce testable and verifiable hypothesis.
You can objectively and empirically test assertions in astronomy. You can't in economics.
The scientific method is a thin veneer best left at in the high school curriculum where it belongs. Actual science is vastly more messy and interesting.