CLICK ON ANY LABEL BELOW TO JUMP TO THAT TOPIC FROM HERE.
1. Scientific Theories and Laws
2. The First Decade (1936-1946)
4. The Second Decade (1946-1956)
6. The Third Decade (1956-1966)
8. The Fourth Decade (1966-1976)
10. The Fifth Decade (1976-1986)
12. The Sixth Decade (1986-1996)
14. The Seventh Decade (1996-2006)
15. The Theory of More than Everything
16. The Eighth Decade (2006-2016)
18. The Ninth Decade (2016-2026)
Appendix A Paintings
Appendix B Caps and Bunnies
Appendix C Musical Compositions
Appendix E A Googolplex Universe
Appendix F Acknowledgements
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It's tough to develop a really good theory. Let's pretend I'm a scientific little kid just playing around. I hit myself on the head with a pretend hammer. It hurts. I come up with a theory I'll call "Hitting me on the head with a hammer hurts." Can I test this theory making it truly scientific? Yes. I'll hit myself on the head a couple more times. Sure enough, it still hurts (although my head's getting a little numb).
But wait a minute. Maybe I can make the theory more general. All kinds of hard things are lying around, and most of them aren't hammers. Let's try a rock. It hurts. A board? Hurts. This is great. But wait; how about an even more general theory? If anyone gets hit in the head by any hard object, their head will hurt. To test this improved theory, I'll get my pretend sister and hit her in the head with a fencepost. Success! However, my pretend dad produced an unexpected side effect.
Is this a good theory? Yes it is, because we can make a prediction. At least we know what will happen the next time I hit my sister in the head with a fencepost. Now if we can find a couple of neighbor kids, we can turn this theory into a scientific law.
A scientific law is a theory tested so many times that we think the statement is a fact, especially if we have some slick mathematics to go with it. However, the line between a theory and a law is a little fuzzy.
We still call Evolution a theory. But by now, so much evidence supports the concept, we should call it a law. In the past, we became so used to Newton's equations, we called them the laws of gravity. His formulas worked for about two hundred years, but Relativity changed the numbers a bit in the 1910's:
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