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It’s never “just a theory”
ОглавлениеMost people use the word theory to refer to an educated guess — a hypothesis. But scientifically speaking, a theory explains how some complex process works in the natural world. For example, the theory of plate tectonics that I cover in detail in Chapter 10 explains how crustal plates on the earth move around, forming mountains and volcanoes and causing earthquakes. The theory explains how all those geologic processes and resulting features are related to one another through the movement of crustal plates.
A theory does not, however, explain why something occurs. The theory of plate tectonics does not answer the question of why the surface of the earth is broken into plates that move around. It only describes how those plates move around and interact with one another to result in the features we observe.
When a scientist describes something as a theory, she has come to the end of a long series of experiments and hypothesis testing. She is able to explain something so well, to provide evidence for that explanation (and to have that something accepted by other scientists as true) that it can be called a theory.
In other words, a theory is a hypothesis that has been thoroughly tested through multiple experiments and is accepted as true by the scientific community. But the work doesn’t end there! Scientists will continue to test hypotheses about the details within a theory, filling in gaps in understanding and looking out for incorrect assumptions that can be corrected to strengthen the theory.