 Apart from this historical analysis, there are currently two prominent and opposed views of the experiment-observation distinction. Ian Hacking has characterized it as well-defined, while avoiding the claim that observation and experiment are opposites (Hacking 1983, 173). According to him, the notions signify different things in scientific practice. The experiment is a thorough manipulation that creates a new phenomenon, and observation of the phenomenon is its outcome. If scientists can manipulate a domain of nature to such an extent that they can create a new phenomenon in a lab, a phenomenon that normally cannot be observed in nature, then they have truly observed the phenomenon (Hacking 1989, 1992).