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Theories aren't laws. Laws are observations. Gravity is a theory: why do balls fall to the ground when you throw them? Gravitation is a law: balls fall to the g
by davidmathers 16y ago
Theories aren't laws. Laws are observations. Gravity is a theory: why do balls fall to the ground when you throw them? Gravitation is a law: balls fall to the ground when you throw them.
Relativity isn't an exception to Newton's law, it's just more accurate. An exception would be a ball not falling to ground after you threw it in the air.
- tel 16y agoThere are precious few Laws like that. Gravity, Constant Proportions, Thermodynamics, etc. While they're taught as a separate, somehow more powerful thing than theory, really they cannot exist without a theoretical framework. Entropy and enthalpy don't exist outside of theory, gravity "always follows the inverse square law" under current beliefs about gravity and theoretical assumptions (when are there ever truly only two interacting bodies?) I prefer to think of laws as statistical correlations that are so repeatable that their variance has gone to zero. These are words that only have meaning in context of a model though. They're embedded in theory, necessarily wrong theory.
- gnaritas 16y agoLaws are just what scientists called what they thought were fundamental theories back in their more arrogant days; they've since matured and no longer promote any theory to law because they know they're probably wrong. Newtons laws are theories just as Einsteins theories are just like Newtons laws. If Newton invented his laws today, we'd call them theories, not laws.