analogkid wrote:
JMOG,
It appears that you have a fundamental but common misunderstanding of the relationship between a scientific theory and a scientific law. A scientific law is an observation of a specific phenomenon that has been made many many times and is generally accepted as fact. It is often stated as an equation. For instance the law of conservation of mass says that the mass of system before a change must be the same as the mass of the system after a change. With a remarkable degree of regularity this can be observed in the natural world around us and it allows chemists to predict how much of raw materials are needed to make a given amount of product. The law offers no explanation as to why this is so. Laws do NOT explain they simply state what is observed. The explanation came a couple of decades after the law was discovered. Conservation of mass as well as several other scientific laws only made sense if one theorized that the world was made of small things called atoms and if those atoms had certain characteristics (see Dalton's Atomic Theory). The point is the atomic theory connected together many observations from the world of chemistry including several laws under a common theme using natural principles. At no point did Dalton actually 'see' the atoms in order for him to infer their presence. As a matter of fact one could argue that we still can not 'see' atoms yet our confidence in their existence is stronger than ever. Only the details have changed as we have gained more information. Back to the point, theories do NOT become laws. Their nature is to use natural explanations as to why the world works the way it does. By nature they change over time as new information allows for refinement of the theory. Every so often they give way to a better natural explanations that better fits the set of observations. I hope that this helps you in your quest for understanding.
I don't have a misunderstanding of theories vs laws.
As a scientist myself (3 scientific degrees) I understand the relationship between theories and laws.
I said that theories are our thoughts on how the universe behaves, laws are things we know as "facts" about how the universe behaves.
At times theories do become laws and vice versa. Before there was a law of conservation of mass was first stated as a physical theory by Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov in 1748. The theory was later confirmed through many exhaustive experiments to be "fact" and changed to the law of conservation of mass.
So you are incorrect, theories are tested over and over again in science, and at the time they are found to be factual, they are not a theory anymore, they are a law.
Newton's Universal Law of Gravititation was originally a theory.
You name a scientific law, and I can nearly guarantee that when it was first proposed it was a scientific theory or a scientific principle.