There are differences. Linguistics is more "descriptive" than "prescriptive", meaning that "it seeks to describe reality" of what people say - if we actually pronounce a word one way and are correctly understood, then that is a valid way that the word is pronounced, whatever it is.

In chemistry, validity is not so subjective. it seeks to describe reality by measuring presence of clearly definable chemicals. The question of "what percentage of the sugar in this food item has been converted via caramelisation (or the Maillard reaction)" is not something that we can choose different but equally correct measurements of.