Donor-Advised Funds. Employer Matching Gifts. Facebook Fundraisers. Free Memberships for Graduate Students. Teaching Resources. Misconception of the Month. Coronavirus Resources. Browse articles by topic. Community Outreach Resources. What We're Monitoring. About NCSE. Our History. Our People. Our Financials. Annual Reports. What if you build a house, and then realize that there is a room with no door, no way to get in or out.
Clearly, something is wrong. Do you walk away, and start all over from scratch? Or do you look to see if there is a way to install a door to make the room useable? Or maybe you decide that the room is not necessary, and remove that part of the building. The same is true for scientific theories.
Finding one flaw in the theory of gravity would probably not send everyone back to construct an entirely new theory. Instead, scientists would examine the new evidence, and see if there was a way to adjust the theory so that the new evidence fit.
That happens quite frequently. As we learn more and more about the universe, we expand and refine our theories, our explanations of how the universe works. Occasionally discoveries are made that are so profound that they do require that we discard the old theory. Then we start from scratch to develop a new theory that fits the new evidence as well as the old. As a comparison, theories explain why we observe what we do and laws describe what happens.
For example, around the year , Jacques Charles and other scientists were working with gases to, among other reasons, improve the design of the hot air balloon. These scientists found, after many, many tests, that certain patterns existed in the observations on gas behavior.
If the temperature of the gas is increased, the volume of the gas increased. This is known as a natural law. A law is a relationship that exists between variables in a group of data. Laws describe the patterns we see in large amounts of data, but do not describe why the patterns exist. A belief is a statement that is not scientifically provable. Beliefs may or may not be incorrect; they just are outside the realm of science to explore. A common misconception is that scientific theories are rudimentary ideas that will eventually graduate into scientific laws when enough data and evidence has accumulated.
A theory does not change into a scientific law with the accumulation of new or better evidence. Remember, theories are explanations and laws are patterns we see in large amounts of data, frequently written as an equation. A theory will always remain a theory; a law will always remain a law. This page was constructed from content via the following contributor s and edited topically or extensively by the LibreTexts development team to meet platform style, presentation, and quality:.
Learning Objectives Describe the difference between hypothesis and theory as scientific terms. Describe the difference between a theory and scientific law. In fact, scientists get a little weary of some people saying that the fact that evolution is a theory means that modern science itself isn't convinced it really happens. Well, the definition of a law is easy. It's a description--usually mathematical--of some aspect of the natural world—such as gravity. The law of gravity describes and quantifies the attraction between two objects.
But the law of gravity doesn't explain what gravity is or why it might work in this way. That's because that kind of explanation falls into the realm of theory.
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