The Scientific Method How Chemists Think

Combustion means burning. The mass of an object is a measure of the quantity of matter within it. 

Sometimes a number of similar observations lead to the development of a scientific law, a brief statement that synthesizes past observahons and predicts future ones. For example, based on his observations of combushon, Lavoisier developed the law of conservahon of mass, which states, In a chemical reaction matter is neither created nor destroyed. This statement grew out of Lavoisier s observations, and it predicted the outcome of similar experiments on any chemical reaction. Laws are also subject to experiments, which can prove them wrong or validate them. 

One or more well-established hypotheses may form the basis for a scientific theory. Theories provide a broader and deeper explanahon for observahons and laws. They are models of the way nature is, and they often predict behavior that 

The atomic theory has 200 years of experimental evidence to support it, including recent images, such as this one, of atoms themselves. This image shows the Kanji characters for atom written with individual iron atoms on top of a copper surface. 

Which statement most resembles a scientific theory  

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