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This discussion always brings back an unpleasant memory for me and reminds me 
of the general public's mostly unintentional misunderstanding of the meaning 
of the word THEORY. In general the popular use of the term THEORY is what 
scientists mean by hypothesis. So the stickers on the books say "evolution is not 
a fact, but a theory" or words to that effect.

When I was in grad school, I was part of a team that gave tours of the 
natural history museum on campus. One of the tours we offered was of the Wards casts 
of fossil fish, reptiles and amphibians located in the halls of the old 
building. During one tour offering, each time we stopped, as I was describing what 
we were looking at and to what time period the specimen belonged, the group 
leader interrupted and said that this was just THEORY and began to debate dating 
techniques. Among his points was that potassium argon dating was also just a 
THEORY and couldn't reveal the real ages of the specimens, which had to be 
something less than 6000 years. As I handed him the photocopies of the tour 
(making theirs a self-guided tour), I pointed out to him that by that reasoning, we 
must really be in the dark, which, as I'd hoped, he took the wrong way, which 
permitted me to surprise him and the group when I said that the lights in the 
old hallways were lit by electricity mostly (in our case) generated at a 
nuclear power plant based on the same THEORY of radioactive decay used in the 
potassium argon dating.

Though I've always thought I could have handled the confrontational situation 
better, I still think that my use of THEORY as an object lesson on 
interlocking pieces of real, measurable experiential phenomena was a good one.

Charlie

Charles Stout
Media Arts Manager
Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum
220 East Ann Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48170

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