The thing about "real" science (as distinct from, say, Social Science) is the concept of disprovability: it's not possible to prove a theory is correct, but a theory should be capable of disproof if it is incorrect. What this means in practice is the theory is published along with supporting evidence, experimemntal data, references, etc. so that anyone else can recreate exactly the same experiments and check the results, and devise new experiments to test the theory further; if anyone can disprove the theory in this way, then we need a better theory.

I'm not sure if what I called a "new theory" is simpy a new hypothesis -- sorry if I'm misleading eveyone! But it's provoked discussion, which is what I intended. Can anyone think of ways to test the hypothesis/theory?

Steve