"The word experimental is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown." John Cage, Silence, p.13.
Would this characterization apply to scientific experiment?
For Rom Harré, experimentation in science can be thought of in a hierarchical manner: Some experiments establish regularities among observed phenomena. Higher level experiments, guided by a model of the underlying process which is not generally observable at the time of the formulation of the theory, are undertaken to try to discover a mechanism through which the cause produces its effect. For Harré, a law of nature is not an independent, free-standing statement, but is intimately bound up with a theory, in the heart of which is a model or analogy which represents the generative mechanisms that produce the phenomena the law describes. (Laws of Nature, p. 114)
experimental
in theory, techno-science