Put simply, science is the pursuit of objective truth and proceeds under the assumption that there is an objective universe external to the human mind. Scientific inquiry is driven mostly by innate curiosity about how nature works; scientists genuinely love what they do and are in it for discovery. Sometimes, progress begins with an observation that does not fit within the existing scientific framework. Scientists then try to repeat and improve on the observation to determine whether it really is an outlier. Next, they may pose one or more hypotheses to explain the observation, and if a hypothesis succeeds in explaining not only that observation but others as well, and especially if it successfully predicts what has not yet been observed, the hypothesis may advance to the status of a theory. In science, theory pertains to a principle or set of principles that have been convincingly well-established. Thus it is usually not reasonable to say that something is “just a theory” in the realm of science. (However, it may not be unreasonable to say that some idea is “just a hypothesis.”) If the theory of general relativity were “just a theory,” no one’s GPS would work.

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