Theory vs. practice in the sciences

This is a response to someone who asked in the comments if we eschew hands-on learning in favor of theory. Here's what Assistant Director of Admissions Emeritus Austin Bean, who knows a lot about math and reasoning, had to say.

Are the sciences here (or anywhere) theoretical to the exclusion of being practical? Well no, and really that’s not possible… Theory informs practice and practice informs theory in every science (but see one possible exception below). No scientists actually, in real life, just theorize in splendid isolation from any thought of experimental results (though they might not carry out experiments themselves), whether prior to their own theorizing or that they imagine might follow from their theorizing. At the boundaries of science, where much theorizing takes place, scientists stand on the firm foundation of well-established results which have come before them. What makes a result well-established? Empirical validation of course! (Speaking generally.)

The processes of theorizing and experimenting are roughly contemporaneous, though it can sometimes take theory time to catch up with experimental results, or experiments time to catch up with the latest theory. The mathematical sciences might be a glaring exception to this practice for the most part. (I say ‘for the most part’ because there’s a book which I have seen in my local bookstore called “Experimental Number Theory.”) Anyway, in your average everyday physical or biological science, as practiced by scientists, people are theorizing and experimenting, or if they do not actually do both at the same time, they are at least aware of experimental work and thinking about how it led to the current state of theory, or aware of theoretical work and how it led to their present experiments. Even the most theoretical regions of physics encourage some experimental work. That’s why physicists are really excited about the opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In short, while it would be incorrect to say that there is no distinction at all between experimenting and theorizing, no science can exist which has only one and not the other. So, naturally it would be foolish of us to teach our science classes differently. In general chemistry, in physics, in biology, etc., all classes have lectures on theory (informed and validated, obviously, by experimental results), and have labs (informed by theory!). You just couldn’t do one without the other.

Incidentally, for an example of "science" which DID proceed without any experimental work, you have only to look to the middle ages, when science was taught directly from Aristotle, without any reference to reality. Libby knows more about this than I do. Actually, Libby might not know much about it, but I’ve heard some funny stories. Not from anyone who was there, obviously, but from people who have read about what was going on then. In short, it doesn’t really work. You might come up with all sorts of reasonable-sounding but actually bat-shit crazy stuff. For example: the earth is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, species are immutable across time and space, the earth is 6500 years old, etc. Science is theory and experiment. You can’t have one without the other. The end!