Words

To the scientific community:

I think it's time to rework some key terms. I know it's rather ridiculous that it might come to this, but here it is. By throwing around certain words, the general public is given (ill-begotten) ammunition for arguments in which they have no leg to stand on. Rather than hold out and hope that eagerness or curiosity will set in and a mass conversion to correct speech occurs, I propose this: Let's just change some of the words.

To the general public:

As you are clearly not willing to learn a little vocabulary, maybe this will help clear a couple of things up

There are some words that, if altered, could probably squash some debates, or at least force the involved parties to examine the opposite side of the argument as well as their own.
Example: Theory vs. Hypothesis.
This is the big one. The word theory, to the general public, seems to imply a large amount of uncertainty. This is, to a point, true, of course, but not in the way certain groups seem to believe. A scientific theory is an educated proposal of explanation that is consistent with existing data and is constantly sharpened. A theory cannot be proven, though. A hypothesis is sort of like a pre-theory. You've got some background knowledge, maybe you've even made some decent observations, but you're just coming up with a tentative guess, mostly so that you have some sort of direction in your research/experiment.
Here's the idea: Suppose you had a few billion dice. You grab a die at random and notice it has six sides, and that the side with the most dots on it has exactly six. You develop a hypothesis: Dice have six dots on their most populated sides. You grab another die, this one having five sides, and notice that the side with the most dots on it has exactly five. Time for a new hypothesis: a die has as many dots on its most populated side as it has sides. You now grab another die and notice the same thing. You continue to do this for a couple thousand dice, always with the same observation. You might begin to form a theory: having sampled so many of these dice at random, and having always observed the same trend, I propose that the side with the most dots has exactly as many dots as the number of sides the die has. Seems solid enough, right? It's still a theory, though, because you haven't proven anything definitively. The only way to do that would be to check every single die, which may not be possible to do. Still, for each die you check, a consistent observation strengthens your theory. Keep in mind, however, that observing a single counterexample would debunk your theory. Do we see the trouble here?

So perhaps, instead of the word theory, we start to use the phrase, "pretty damn sure." I think this will clear up some confusion.

There is, of course, a big follow-up post to come, and I'm sure you can guess the general idea. Let's leave that one for another day, though. In the meantime, I have a hypothesis that I'll be sleeping in the next five minutes or so.