Re: F=ma: law or theory?

[Robert Cohen <Robert.Cohen@PO-BOX.ESU.EDU>]

On Tuesday, October 16, 2001 5:00 PM, Michael Edmiston
quote the following from "Academic American Encyclopedia":

> The basic physical laws share two surprising properties: they are all
> unproven and also unprovable.  Developed from observation and
> experimentation, they are assumed valid as long as no natural
> violations of
> them can be found.  The universe does not behave as we say it
> must; rather,
> it is presumed that natural physical laws exist and have
> always existed.  It
> is the goal of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers
> to discover and
> define natural laws.

Also on Tuesday, October 16, 2001 3:51 PM, Marc "Zeke" Kossover wrote:

> Not only do physicists have no universally accepted definitions of
"theory",
> "law",  "principle", and so on, neither does anyone else. The use of one
or
> another depends on the people proposing the idea in the first place, the
> language they wrote in, and the politics of the time.

So is the answer that some people do, indeed, consider N2 to be a
theory?  Is it correct to say there is no difference between a law
and a theory?  If the definitions are so fluid, why is it that no
one refers to the "law of evolution"?  Is it just convention or
would it be "incorrect" to do so?

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| Robert Cohen               Department of Physics       |
|                            East Stroudsburg University |
| rcohen@po-box.esu.edu      East Stroudsburg, PA  18301 |
| http://www.esu.edu/~bbq/   (570) 422-3428              |
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