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Talk:Scientific law (view source)
Revision as of 20:33, September 28, 2010
, 20:33, September 28, 2010Is this explanation good enough to go in the article?
:There are plenty of things that are considered scientific law by a very large majority. For example, the laws of thermodynamics, or the laws of pressure, etc. --[[User:TempestHead]]
:There are plenty of things that are considered scientific law by a very large majority. For example, the laws of thermodynamics, or the laws of pressure, etc. --[[User:TempestHead]]
::The viewpoint of this article, apart from the liberal polemics I discarded, seems to be that a '''law''' indicates a relationship that always holds true, even if we don't understand why. A '''theory''' is an explanation of the relationship.
::So in astronomy we may note that big things have little things orbiting around them: sun and planets, planets and moons. [[Kepler's Laws]] describe this motion, with the big thing at one focus of an ellipse, and the little thing tracing the outline of the ellipse. (Note that a lot of these ellipses are very nearly circular; it's generally only the comets or stray asteroids which have eccentric ellipses.)
::But it's a '''theory''' that the responsibility for this motion is [[gravity]], a "[[force]]" which pulls the big thing and little thing together in proportion to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers of mass. --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] <sup>[[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]]</sup> 16:33, 28 September 2010 (EDT)