That's another misconception about science. Scientific thories are
=always= beliefs, until DISPROVEN. Nothing can be "proven" in science.
Huh?

It's a common misconception that science "proves" things. This is not
so. Science is not about proving anything.

Science is a method by which we try to figure out how the world works.
It is an ongoing process, always subject to revision when experiment
disagrees with our ideas to date. But since our experience (and
experiments) are always incomplete, there will probably always be things
we have overlooked, odd effects we hadn't seen, consequences we haven't
come across. The more exepriments we do, and the more carefully we do
them, the better a view of the world we can get.

For a long time motion was a mystery. We knew (viscerally) how things
moved, at least well enough to capture prey, escape being eaten, and
play games. But we just accepted that heavy things fall. It was
obvious that heavier things fall faster (feather, stone, duh) but nobody
knew why. It's quite possible that nobody cared. But then somebody
thought about it, and after a proverbial bop on the head came up with an
idea that every action has a reaction, and that everything with mass
attracts everything else with mass, including the earth. He formulated
these ideas mathematically (so they could be measured and tested), and
then he went out and tested them.

This is called "falsifiability". If his ideas were incorrect, the
experiment should show him up. This is critial to a true scientific
theory. If it is not falsifiable, (that is, testable), then it is not a
scientific theory. A statement like "There is a God" is not a
scientific theory for that reason. It cannot be tested in a manner in
which failure is meaningful.

Anyway, after dropping things off of tall towers (I'm compressing
scintific history here), measuring the twist of wires attached to heavy
balls, and timing balls going down ramps, the findings did not
contradict his idea, but supported it. Thus, we become more confident
that Newtonian mechanics accurately represents reality.

One of the experiments (rolling balls down an incline), if done simply,
illustrates this. Calculate the forces on the ball, and figure out how
long it should take to accelerate down the ramp, based on the angle of
the ramp. You'll find the results actually =disagree= with theory.
They go slower at first. Hmmm... think think think... Well, the balls
are rolling; we didn't think of rotational energy the first time around.
Physics must be a bit more complicated than we though. Now we have to
come up with another theory, or modify the existing one. It makes sense
that it takes some of the energy to spin the ball, in addition to the
energy it takes to get it to move down the ramp. By using some
mathematical techniques we can come up with a good idea of how much that
probably should be.

Once we add that to the theory, everything works out. We've discovered
something new about the world.

Newtonian mechanics (as modified to include torque) has =not= been
"proven". It merely has acquired a lot of support. If it turns out
that it is incorrect, the new theory will still have to explain all the
stuff that Newtonian mechanics explained, and that's going to be hard.

But not impossible.

It turns out that NM is in fact -incorrect-. Experiments with light
waves showed that at high speeds, things are different. More
mathematics, and a new idea emerged... Einsteinian Relativity (ER).
It's bizzare, to be sure, but experiments attempting to knock it down
have failed to disprove it. Meanwhile, it explains everything that NM
does, plus addresses high speeds, and gives us new insights to the world
to boot. ER has gotten a lot of support, because it has =withstood=
many tests designed to burst its bubble.

It's not the last word. There never will be a last word. But as our
understanding of the world gets more sophisticated, our theories get
closer to reality.

None is ever =proven=.

Jose
--
"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where
it keeps its brain." (chapter 10 of book 3 - Harry Potter).
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