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A common misconception is that scientific theories are rudimentary ideas that will eventually graduate into scientific laws when enough data and evidence have been accumulated. A theory does not change into a scientific law with the accumulation of new or better evidence. A theory will always remain a theory; a law will always remain a law.
The term "scientific law" is traditionally associated with the natural sciences, though the social sciences also contain laws. [11] For example, Zipf's law is a law in the social sciences which is based on mathematical statistics. In these cases, laws may describe general trends or expected behaviors rather than being absolutes.
The word theory in "the theory of evolution" does not imply scientific doubt regarding its validity; the concepts of theory and hypothesis have specific meanings in a scientific context. While theory in colloquial usage may denote a hunch or conjecture, a scientific theory is a set of principles that explains an observable phenomenon in natural ...
Law. A law is a principle that helps to explain the natural world, often provided in the form of an equation. There is a common misunderstanding that a scientific law is higher in some hierarchy than a scientific theory and that a theory may eventually become a law if it gets enough support. That is wrong.
Artin reciprocity law is a general theorem in number theory that forms a central part of global class field theory. Named after Emil Artin . Ashby's law of requisite variety, that the number of states in a control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system it controls.
When a hypothesis has survived a sufficient number of tests, it may be promoted to a scientific theory. A theory is a hypothesis that has survived many tests and seems to be consistent with other established scientific theories. Since a theory is a promoted hypothesis, it is of the same 'logical' species and shares the same logical limitations.
For example, physical laws such as the law of gravity or scientific laws attempt to describe the fundamental nature of the universe itself. Laws of mathematics and logic describe the nature of rational thought and inference (Kant's transcendental idealism, and differently G. Spencer-Brown's work Laws of Form, was precisely a determination of the a priori laws governing human thought before any ...
This list includes well-known general theories in science and pre-scientific natural philosophy and natural history that have since been superseded by other scientific theories. Many discarded explanations were once supported by a scientific consensus , but replaced after more empirical information became available that identified flaws and ...