Physics people: At what point does Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity become a "law"?

Hasn't the theory, by now, been proven to be true?

She must be loyal to classical, Newtonian physics.

:thumbsup:

The article says that scientific theory must be falsifiable. But how are Einstein's theories of relativity (special and general) "falsifiable"? And how are Newton's laws NOT falsifiable?

Of course they are. But accepted laws have never been shown to be false. But if we found a planet today that violated Newton's laws, then the "law" would be proven false. But don't expect that to happen soon.

Einstein's theories were very falsifiable, but experiment after experiment has shown them, so far, not to be false.

Build a space ship that goes faster than the speed of light, then you'd have falsified relativity.

Apply a force to an object without applie a force in the equal and opposite direction, and you'd have falsified Newton's laws.

But until someone actually does built a space ship that exceeds the speed of light, how can we say his theories are falsifiable?

If one could concieve an experiment that would disprove relativity, then it would be falsifiable.

If one did the experiment, acheived FTL, then it would be false.

Just because something is true does not mean it's not falsifiable.

Laws are rules for how nature will behave under certain conditions. Theories explain why nature works the way it does and why it has certain characteristics. In a sense, theories are actually stronger than laws in that they explain nature on an everyday basis.

In common parlance, a "theory" is something that is taken to be speculation. But in scientific jargon, a theory is much more than that. A hypothesis is speculation or conjecture, and is only called a theory after it is consistently verified in scientific-method experimentation.

For example, we still have the "theory" of gravity, not the "law" of gravity, though certainly no one is suggesting that gravity is not a fact!

the earth sucks

:P

:grr:

:toast:

:toast:

The equivalence of mass and energy is one; then there's the constancy of the speed of light. Most of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_special_relativity">consequences are considered as laws.

General Relativity widens the theory to describe acceleration and equates it to gravity, which to some degree invalidates consequences of Special Relativity. We still refer to Newton's Laws of Motion, though, because they're still so useful and essentially true for so many cases. So it is with Special Relativity's consequences.

Newton's Laws no longer apply in situations where an object is moving at velocities approaching the speed the light. So how can they be "laws"?

...except as keeper of the secret to life, the universe and everything. We still use Boyle's Law, for example, despite its failure to precisely describe the behavior of real gases. Newton is still plenty useful for planning a mission to Jupiter.

Newton's Laws are still capitalized a lot, even though there are exceptions. We are so much more likely to need to compute the acceleration of an automobile than we are the precession of Mercury's perihelion that Newtonian mechanics are still taught in school. Heck, Newton himself would have understood everything I learned in a college class in Mechanics two decades ago. Relativity and Quantum Theory go further in explaining how the universe really works, but for most of us earthbound mortals, Newton is all that's needed.

In this context, "theory" means, more or less, a school of thought, not an idea that may or may not be true.

the "laws" would be a subset of the theory.

For example, Newtons theory of motion has laws, F = ma, for example.

Think, for example, germ theory, or color theory, or the Pythagorean theorem.

So E = mc^2 would be a law, and part of Einstein's theory of relativity.

Makes more sense to me now.