Scientific law

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A scientific law, is a law-like statement that generalizes across a set of conditions. To be accorded law-like status a wide variety of these conditions should be known, i.e. the law has a well documented history of successful replication and extension to new conditions. Ideally boundary conditions, where the law fails, should also be known.

A scientific law concerns the physical world. It therefore must have empirical content and consequently be capable of testing and potentially of disproof. Analytic statements that are true or false by logic alone are not scientific laws, though may feature as part of scientific theories.

The concept of a scientific law is closely related to the concept of a scientific theory. A scientific law attempts to describe an observation in nature while a scientific theory attempts to explain it.

The term "scientific law" is traditionally associated with the natural sciences and hence the term is used interchangeably with the term physical laws. The biological sciences also have scientific laws, such as Mendelian inheritance and the Hardy-Weinberg principle found in genetics. The social sciences also contain scientific laws ^[1].