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Originally Posted by mrnoodle
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What are you talking about? That whole article was about how they were physically testing their theory in several ways.
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means that you can come up with whatever imaginary objects/forces that you want, assign them a relationship based on what you want to see happen, and call it a day.
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Not quite. You invent imaginary objects/forces and assign them a relationship based on what you
actually see happen. At this point, it's a guess. Then you make predictions of what else must be true if you're right, and design an experiment to test them. At this point, it's a hypothesis. Then you perform the experiment and see whether the results align with the predictions. If they do, you've got a theory. If not, you've got nothing. If other scientists perform experiments that match your predictions, your theory becomes stronger. If they perform experiments that disagree with your predictions, your theory becomes weaker, or is discarded.