From: John Beckett 

"Gary Britt"  wrote in message
news::
> What is a hypothesis?  Its a GUESS that gets tested under certain limited
> circumstances.  A GUESS that can turn out to be wrong.  Like you or Steve
> said it took 300 years for the hypothesis/GUESS about the theory of Gravity
> to be replaced by the theory/Guess of relativity.  For 300 years all the
> John Becketts and Steve Ewings of the world had *faith* in the correctness
> of the theory of gravity, however.  What guesses do you hold dear today that
> will be replaced by new guesses 300 years from now?

A very nice blend of fact and fiction there Gary!

The Theory of Gravity is still true! It works just as well today as it did
4 billion years ago, with all the objects that we come across in our
everyday lives.

It's just that when you take very accurate measurements involving very big
or very fast objects, you need another theory to explain what you see. Note
that "explain" is not quite the right word. In science, a theory
DESCRIBES events more than it explains them. If the theory can predict the
outcomes of other events, and no reproducible event contradicts the theory,
then we come to accept the theory as an explanation (but that is a human
interpretation - the science is just describing how things happen in the
universe).

So, Newton's views of gravity are still accurate, but they are incomplete.

John

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