Is gravity just a theory?
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘just’, but yes, gravity is a theory. Not just one theory, but several are associated with gravity. Some of these theories are extremely well verified (as your common sense will tell you when you drop an apple), while others are less well verified, such as the existence of gravity waves. Several of these theories were well verified in past times, and gained the moniker ‘law’, such as Newton’s Laws, but in recent times it’s normal practice to continue to use the word ‘theory’ even when well verified, such as Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
No, it’s not a theory. It has been proved that gravity exists. Sometime in the 1500’s, Galileo discovered gravity. He believed that it would be inertia at first, but it was actually gravity. A famous experiment that he did was that he dropped different objects off the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. Newton discovered gravity too when he was sitting under a tree and an apple fell onto him. He wondered about this and proved that there is gravity. Gravity holds everything in the world together.
Either gravity is a Law or the Earth literally sucks. Otherwise the planet could have never formed (nor the solar system) and we wouldn’t be here. Hypothesis: A tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena; a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing becomes a scientific theory. Theory: A comprehensive explanation of a given set of data that has been repeatedly confirmed by observation and experimentation and has gained general acceptance within the scientific community but has not yet been decisively proven. Scientific Law: A natural phenomenon that has been proven to occur invariably whenever certain conditions are met. 2. A formal statement describing such a phenomenon and the conditions under which it occurs.
