How do hypotheses become theories

Science can answer any question. The climate on Antarctica was once warmer than it is now. The center of the earth is made of platinum. You have a hypothesis that the land near your school was once at the bottom of the ocean, but due to continental movement, it is now miles inland from any water source.

How would you test your hypothesis? What evidence would you use to support your claim? Special Feature Type: Practices of Science. Further Investigations: What is an Invertebrate? Question Set: What is a Mammal? Further Investigations: What is a Mammal? For example, when punctuated equilibrium was proposed as a mode of evolutionary change and evidence was found supporting the idea in some situations, it represented an elaborated reinforcement of evolutionary theory, not a refutation of it.

Over-arching theories are so important because they help scientists choose their methods of study and mode of reasoning, connect important phenomena in new ways, and open new areas of study. For example, evolutionary theory highlighted an entirely new set of questions for exploration: How did this characteristic evolve?

How are these species related to one another? How has life changed over time? Benefits of science Even theories change. How science works page 19 of 21 previous next. The process of science works in much the same way whether embodied by an individual scientist tackling a specific problem, question, or hypothesis over the course of a few months or years, or by a community of scientists coming to agree on broad ideas over the course of decades and hundreds of individual experiments and studies.

Similarly, scientific explanations come at different levels: Hypotheses Hypotheses are proposed explanations for a fairly narrow set of phenomena. Theories Theories , on the other hand, are broad explanations for a wide range of phenomena.

They are concise i. In fact, theories often integrate and generalize many hypotheses. This theory helps us understand a wide range of observations from the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to the physical match between pollinators and their preferred flowers , makes predictions in new situations e.

As anyone who has worked in a laboratory or out in the field can tell you, science is about process: that of observing, making inferences about those observations, and then performing tests to see if the truth value of those inferences holds up.

The scientific method is designed to be a rigorous procedure for acquiring knowledge about the world around us. In scientific reasoning, a hypothesis is constructed before any applicable research has been done. A theory, on the other hand, is supported by evidence: it's a principle formed as an attempt to explain things that have already been substantiated by data.

Toward that end, science employs a particular vocabulary for describing how ideas are proposed, tested, and supported or disproven. And that's where we see the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. A hypothesis is an assumption, something proposed for the sake of argument so that it can be tested to see if it might be true.

In the scientific method, the hypothesis is constructed before any applicable research has been done, apart from a basic background review.

You ask a question, read up on what has been studied before, and then form a hypothesis. A hypothesis is usually tentative, an assumption or suggestion made strictly for the objective of being tested. When a character which has been lost in a breed, reappears after a great number of generations, the most probable hypothesis is, not that the offspring suddenly takes after an ancestor some hundred generations distant, but that in each successive generation there has been a tendency to reproduce the character in question, which at last, under unknown favourable conditions, gains an ascendancy.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species , According to one widely reported hypothesis , cell-phone transmissions were disrupting the bees' navigational abilities. Few experts took the cell-phone conjecture seriously; as one scientist said to me, "If that were the case, Dave Hackenberg's hives would have been dead a long time ago. A theory , in contrast, is a principle that has been formed as an attempt to explain things that have already been substantiated by data.

Another feature of a good theory is that it formed from a number of hypotheses that can be tested independently. A scientific theory is not the end result of the scientific method; theories can be proven or rejected, just like hypotheses. Theories can be improved or modified as more information is gathered so that the accuracy of the prediction becomes greater over time.

Theories are foundations for furthering scientific knowledge and for putting the information gathered to practical use. Scientists use theories to develop inventions or find a cure for a disease. Some think that theories become laws, but theories and laws have separate and distinct roles in the scientific method.

A law is a description of an observed phenomenon in the natural world that hold true every time it is tested.