re: #273 Belafon

I went and read through this, undsci.berkeley.edu, and it’s a different interpretation of hypothesis and theory than what I learned, even in my science classes, 35 years ago mind you. I was always told that a hypothesis was an unproven theory. According to this, it’s just about scale. And it seems to me that any one of them could be proven wrong later, if your evidence changes. Thanks for making me think about it.

The problem is, many textbooks for primary and secondary students get the definitions wrong, and many teachers are fuzzy about them as well.

Since we were talking about math, a hypothesis is analogous to a geometric proof, while a theory is analogous to Euclidean geometry.