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Originally Posted by xepherys
Uhm... what?
Let me just quote the following, because it pretty much sums it up. From yet another Wikipedia entry:
Generally when a scientific law is established, it is so done out of fact. The law of inertia, the law of universal gravitation, et cetera... these are facts. They may not be wholly understood, but they are universally recognized as indisputable and are wholly repeatable ad infinitum. I hate to keep referencing Wikipedia, but it's generally a decent source. |
For the longest time, Newtonian physics was LAW. Now? It's outdated and simplistic compared to what has been developed since. What, then, is a law that can be broken by progress? Why, it's a theory. Like the theory of relativity and the theory of gravity; they are considered factual, but that could eventually change. And that's the wonderful part of science; it has no ego. If old science is proven wrong, new science takes it's place and science as a whole improves. It always takes steps forward and, so long as it's left out of the hands of fundamentalists, never takes steps back.
From wiki:
In common usage, the word theory is often used to signify a conjecture, an opinion, a speculation, or a hypothesis[, but in] science a theory is a testable model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise verified through empirical observation.
That sounds dangerously close to the description I posted: "an explanation or model based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning, especially one that has been tested and confirmed as a general principle helping to explain and predict natural phenomena"