@Dr. Dipwad,
In all honesty, what I learned about "theory" was not intended to be taken too seriously. Rather, it was merely a commentary about the irony of scientific discovery, and that the scientific method is required to prove or disprove a theory.
This is something I would have loved to have spoken with my Dad about at the dinner table. Sadly, my Dad's life was cut short at age 61, for several health reasons.
Perhaps I was reaching out to evoke both serious and humorous responses. It may be that rather than discourage talk about what people hold dear to them, my less than tongue-in-cheek humor fell short of its goal. And perhaps it's best to not pursue trivial matters when we know that ruffling the feathers of scientists is comparable to attacking science. At least in theory, pardon the pun. I wouldn't want to be considered the enemy "hun" army storming the castle.
Gotcha, makes sense. (And, I relate to what you say about wanting to talk with one's Dad at the dinner table, and being unable.)
In the area of serious response -- and not at all meant in a cantankerous way, but more like a, "careful, there's a pothole in the road there, you might wish to step around it" -- I would point out the difficulty of using the phrase "
only a theory" or "a
mere theory" in scientific circles.
As you noted, one cannot run a practical experiment replicating the formation of the universe. Likewise, one cannot create an experiment wherein one tries to evolve life on earth and see how it goes. And, supposing one has proposed marriage to a woman, and she accepts, one would not be wise to
take it back, and then try to
re-run the experiment to see if the result can be replicated! (One's results, the second time out, are certain to vary significantly from the first time.)
So what do we do, when the "scientific method" (strictly speaking) is not available to us, but the question seems nevertheless to fall within the domain of "natural philosophy" (dealing with the created order, involving phenomena which are quantifiable and have spatial position and duration)?
Well, we propose
secondary hypotheses. If you can't run a full-scale experiment -- i.e. if you can't rebuild the universe from scratch -- you can still propose a "big" hypothesis of how everything got here, and then propose multiple "small" hypotheses which
should logically follow if the first "big" hypothesis is true. (Example:
If the "Big Bang,"
then we should expect radio telescopes to detect background radiation.)
Now, these
secondary hypotheses are useful because they are falsifiable given experimental data which you may have already collected, or might collect in the future. If you find that they are never falsified, then that starts to count as experimental data not falsifying the original "big" hypothesis.
And that's where the word "theory" comes in.
In philosophy of science parlance, not every "hypothesis" counts as a "theory," because the word "theory" is given a special cachet.
To be a "theory," a hypothesis has to...
- have spawned multiple secondary hypotheses in multiple domains
- have those secondary hypotheses not be falsified
- have those secondary hypotheses generate new tertiary hypotheses
- have those tertiary hypotheses not be falsified
- have new domains of experiment and technology open up from this collected body of hypotheses, which would not have opened up had the original "big" hypothesis not been proposed
- have the whole thing stick around long enough to be a sort of common-culture pillar of the relevant sciences
That's when we start calling it a "theory."
A good example is genetics, courtesy of our old pea-planting friend Gregor Mendel, and enhanced by Crick & Watson.
It isn't just that we
hypothesize that chromosomes formed from strands of DNA carry traits which are expressed in the organism. It's that we've seen that never falsified, and proposed explanations of inherited diseases, which were
also not falsified, and this opened up new realms of treatment for those diseases and experiments in gene-splicing, producing new technologies and new experiments that actually worked, and it's been around long enough that if there was some huge gaping hole in it, it would have been called out by now by some new generation of young-and-upcoming geneticists.
So it's not "the Genetic Hypothesis"; it's "the Genetic Theory." One could say the same for the Quantum Theory with certain qualifiers.
Anyway, this is a lot of words to have spent on distinguishing between hypothesis and Theory, and explaining why hypothesis could be reasonably qualified with turns-of-phrase like
mere and
only a, but "Theory" probably shouldn't. Prepending "Theory" with "only a" makes sense in colloquial usage ("I think that squeaky sound in my car may be a fan belt wearing out; but that's only a theory") but doesn't fit well with the scientific usage. (A scientist might work for decades, and still only
hope he might, one day, be credited with a new
theory.)
That's it! Sorry to be a noodge ...and in the middle of a "Dad Jokes" thread, too!
All the best,
Dr. D
