Chapter Eight. Experiments
"NATURAL" EXPERIMENTS
Sometimes, it's possible to lay an experimental template
over actual events and undertake analyses as though we had designed some
grand experiment to be conducted in real life. Following the Three-Mile
Island nuclear accident in 1978, researchers set about constructing, in
retrospect, an experimental design in which they would have selected comparable
nuclear power plants and then caused an accident in one of them, as a way
of determining the consequences of such an event.