I don't think your explanation is quite right, either. Typically, a "hypothesis" is in the form of "we think x will happen in y circumstance". Then they run som

I don't think your explanation is quite right, either. Typically, a "hypothesis" is in the form of "we think x will happen in y circumstance". Then they run some experiments to see if that's the case. If it is, then they may try to come up with a theory to explain why, then run (many) additional experiments to test the theory. In other words, I usually use the word "hypothesis" to mean a simple prediction of outcome, without any explanation of how. A "theory" needs some explanation in it, not just a prediction of correlation.