In science parlance, a ‘theory’ is a consistent and well established model of the observed reality. Hence ‘relativity theory’, ‘quantum theory’, ‘Maxwell theory’, ‘evolution theory’ or ‘germ theory’.
Antiscience nuts love to use the different meaning of that word in non-scientific environments to create confusion and support their lies.
Yeah people get mixed up on the fact that science has theories and laws.
A scientific law is a mathematical relationship. Force is equal to mass times acceleration. In an isolated system entropy can only increase. Gravitational force is equal to the gravitational constant times the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance between their centers of mass. And other such things. It is limited, factual, and does not answer why, it merely says what consistently has happened.
A scientific theory can be proven false, and attempts have been made to do so but failed. They attempt to explain what’s going on and/or why. The theory of gravity is that mass distorts spacetime to draw masses together, which is very different from the law of gravity I described in the previous paragraph. The theory of speciation as a result of evolution by means of natural and sexual selection would take multiple miracles to disprove at this point given how much evidence we have, but pieces of it can still change, and it’s not a concrete mathematical relationship so it will never be a law.
A hypothesis is a proposed theory that hasn’t been sufficiently tested (attempted to be disproven) to qualify as a theory. In science all experiments require beating the default “null hypothesis” which is that there is insufficient evidence to assert correlation.
Science isn’t what we know but how we prove we know it.
Is germ theory still a theory or is it germ fact now m?
In science parlance, a ‘theory’ is a consistent and well established model of the observed reality. Hence ‘relativity theory’, ‘quantum theory’, ‘Maxwell theory’, ‘evolution theory’ or ‘germ theory’.
Antiscience nuts love to use the different meaning of that word in non-scientific environments to create confusion and support their lies.
Thanks.
I want to stress that I don’t fall in to the latter and was curious of the science meaning.
Yeah people get mixed up on the fact that science has theories and laws.
A scientific law is a mathematical relationship. Force is equal to mass times acceleration. In an isolated system entropy can only increase. Gravitational force is equal to the gravitational constant times the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance between their centers of mass. And other such things. It is limited, factual, and does not answer why, it merely says what consistently has happened.
A scientific theory can be proven false, and attempts have been made to do so but failed. They attempt to explain what’s going on and/or why. The theory of gravity is that mass distorts spacetime to draw masses together, which is very different from the law of gravity I described in the previous paragraph. The theory of speciation as a result of evolution by means of natural and sexual selection would take multiple miracles to disprove at this point given how much evidence we have, but pieces of it can still change, and it’s not a concrete mathematical relationship so it will never be a law.
A hypothesis is a proposed theory that hasn’t been sufficiently tested (attempted to be disproven) to qualify as a theory. In science all experiments require beating the default “null hypothesis” which is that there is insufficient evidence to assert correlation.
Science isn’t what we know but how we prove we know it.
It’s a fact as much as gravity and evolution are facts.