Talk:Scientific law

Rewrote the entire thing. The definition is accurate now, put in examples from physics and an explanation of the difference between a law and a theory. I think examples of laws and theories from Chemistry, Biology, etc. would be great. Also, I think an introductory paragraph might be needed, I don't know. ArnoldFriend 18:00, 25 September 2008 (EDT)

I question the validity of this article, since there really is no such thing as scientific law. ColinR 17:15, 15 March 2007 (EDT)

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. --Ed Poor ^Talk 16:33, 28 September 2010 (EDT)