akuma587 said:
There is too much misunderstanding out there about what the word theory means. Theory is a pretty hefty label in science. Science has more and more frequently moved away from the label "law," because many of the things we once thought were "laws," like the law of gravity, are not really laws at all because or understanding of what we labelled a law is still incomplete.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory
Here is a decent discussion of what theory means:
In science, the word theory is used as a plausible general principle or body of principles offered to explain a phenomenon.[3]. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet but we invoke theories of gravity to explain this occurrence. However, even inside the sciences the word theory picks out several different concepts dependent on the context. In casual speech scientists don't use the term theory in a particularly precise fashion, allowing historical accidents to determine whether a given body of scientific work is called a theory, law, principle or something else. For instance Einstein's relativity is usually called "the theory of relativity" while Newton's theory of gravity often is called "the law of gravity." In this kind of casual use by scientists the word theory can be used flexibly to refer to whatever kind of explanation or prediction is being examined. It is for this instance that a scientific theory is a claim based on a body of evidence.
Now here is a definition:
A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world. The theory of biological evolution is more than "just a theory." It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact.[6] |
This. Nobody is questioning the "theory" of relativity or the "theory" of gravity. Theory in science doesn't mean the same thing as "theory" in everyday speech.
