Scientific Laws and Theories

In science, a law is a concise statement, verbal or mathematical, that summarizes an observation and states what will happen under certain conditions. It is a universally accepted statement, and must never be wrong. Otherwise, any science based upon it would be proven incorrect.

For example, in case of the phenomenon of combustion, Lavoisier validated his hypothesis through a series of experiments and then stated that the mass of an object remains conserved during combustion. This statement became one of the famous laws of chemistry, the Law of Conservation of Mass, which states that ‘Mass in an isolated system can neither be created nor destroyed’.

A scientific theory, unlike a law, is a unifying model that provides an explanation as to why and how something happens. It requires rigorous experimentation and observations conducted over a long period of time to develop a theory. 

For example, the Law of Conservation of Mass did not explain why the mass remains unchanged after combustion. An explanation for this phenomenon was put forward when John Dalton proposed the Atomic Theory. Dalton’s Theory proposed that matter is composed of small, indivisible particles called atoms. Since t