&gt; Yeah you &quot;explore stuff&quot; in any field.<p>And you do experiments in many fields!<p>&quot;An experiment is a procedure carried out to verify, refute, or establish the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Experiment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Experiment</a><p>Particularly debugging, if you aren&#x27;t completely random, usually takes on the form of repeated experiments.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;c2.com&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;wiki?DebuggingAndTheScientificMethod" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;c2.com&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;wiki?DebuggingAndTheScientificMethod</a><p>I have done a lot of performance work in my career, and there you run experiments almost continuously.  At least you do if you actually want to have an effect.  Admittedly, many people try to optimize without running experiments.  That tends to not be very effective.<p>And yes, computer systems are easily sufficiently complex that reasoning it out ahead of time without running the experiment tends to be completely futile except for the most trivial arrangements.  In fact, even in some situations that seem completely trivial.<p>&gt; I am going to buy milk -- it&#x27;s an experiment to see what happens.<p>If you have a hypothesis and you&#x27;re trying to find out if it is true or not, sure, that can be an experiment.  Usually it probably won&#x27;t be.<p>&gt; I am drinking coffee in the morning, it&#x27;s an experiment to see if it will still keep me awake.<p>That certainly <i>can</i> be an experiment, for example if you vary the amount of coffee to see how much of will be keep you awake.  Though it seems unlikely that you will be isolating the variables sufficiently.  With computers, isolating the variables is often a lot simpler.<p>&gt; By that token we&#x27;ve diluted the word science to not really mean anything anymore.<p>Going with your straw-men:  probably.