When does a theory become a law?
NEVER. Theories never “grow up” to become laws, EVER. Theories are complex logical arguments, starting from a small set of postulates, and deriving all the possible logical conclusions of those postulates. They explain a wide range of phenomena (the conclusions) in terms of the postulates. They furthermore predict new phenomena that have never been observed (the conclusions that have never been tested). Newton’s THEORY of gravity (NOT “law of gravity”) starts with the postulate that gravity is a force of attraction between bodies proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. It explained the current knowledge of elliptical planetary orbits, and predicted the existence of bodies on parabolic and hyperbolic orbits (long period comets). Laws are simple mathematical statements of highly repeatable observations. The Law of Gravity (Galileo’s, not Newton’s) is that all bodies fall at the same rate. A complex logical argument can NEVER bec
