Whenever someone tells you that they “have a theory,” you’re probably a mix of curious and skeptical, and with good reason. Most often, you’re going to hear a wild tale that’s a mix of true and dubious facts, possible but suspicious links between them, guesses that range from informed hypotheses to extravagant speculations, and a story about how they’ve introduced one (or more) modifications to the standard story of how things are known work. This is almost always followed with an important caveat at the end: that they have no proof of this, as it’s “only a theory.” In common, informal use, the word theory is tossed around as casually as words like: among others.
In other words, when someone shares their pet theory with you in this regard, you might humor them by considering it, but you’d be well within the bounds of reasons to dismiss their “theory” without putting too much weight behind it. But some people take this informal definition of theory — as a mere hypothesis, guess, or idea — and apply it to our most vaunted of scientific theories as well. They’ll argue that Darwinian evolution, the Big Bang, gravitation, and quantum mechanics are just “theories” as well, and therefore shouldn’t be taken to be facts.
They’ll argue that theories were overturned in the past, and so they’re justified in not believing today’s theories that are well-accepted as part of the scientific consensus. Some will even point to now-discredited scientific ideas, like the theory of phlogiston, Jungian psychology, or the Lamarckian theory of evolution, or to speculative ideas that have “theory” in the title, like Grand Unified Theory or string theory, to argue that many of our best, currently-accepted theories will eventually turn out to be wrong. But this is a fundamentally dishonest argument, as any scientist will be quick to realize.
Here’s what everyone should know about what the word “theory” truly means: in everyday conversation, in scientific circles, in mathematics, and beyond. This animation shows the breakup of supercontinent Gondwanaland, which itself was a large subsection of Pangaea at one point, into the smaller continents of South America, Antarctica, Africa, Australia, as well as components of other continents that are recognizable, such as Arabia and India. The theory of plate tectonics and continental drift is so successful because of the evidence that supports it.
In our everyday life, the word “theory” that we hear bandied about is simply the same as the word “idea.” We make no distinction between whether that idea is: In our everyday life, we all have that friend, neighbor, or relative who has rather kooky ideas — something akin to “the Moon is a hologram” or “a secret race of lizard people is controlling the Earth” — and likely refers to their idea as a theory, just as surely as scientists refer to Einstein’s relativity as a theory. The much-ballyhooed idea of panpsychism, although often called a theory, falls into this category of an untestable notion with no evidence behind it. Four times a year, the Big Think print magazine shows up at your door.
Big ideas from the world's biggest thinkers. In all of these cases, we’re only talking about an idea: the initial germ of a hypothesis. Hypotheses may yet grow into fully-fledged scientific theories, and indeed what eventually become scientific theories typically start off as mere hypotheses or ideas, but simply having an idea doesn’t mean you have a good idea, a valid idea, or even a scientific idea, much less a scientific theory.
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