I wrote this sentence, and I’m wondering if I should say “lots of theory” or “lots of theories”. Which is correct?
Time after time lots of theory and experiments made their assumption wrong and this overcome came because of getting proper knowledge about the gravity and employing that successfully.
Answer
Theory can be both a countable and an uncountable noun, so both "lots of theory" and "lots of theories" can be correct, but they mean slightly different things.
In its countable form, a theory is a hypothesis about how something works that can lead to the design of experiments or predictions, or (esp. in mathematics) a collection of propositions that together form a model of how something works which can be investigated independently to give results relevant to that theory.
There are a lot of theories about how the universe started.
There are a lot of theories about where and when life originated.
The students had a lot of different theories about why the mixture turned purple after we added the litmus.
In its uncountable form, theory (as opposed to practice) refers to non-experimental study of a subject. For instance, a theoretical physicist is a physicist who only does theory of physics, and does not generally perform experiments (unlike an experimental physicist).
I took a Math III course with Professor Widget – there was a lot of theory in his courses!
I took Professor Handson’s class instead of Professor Thinkalot’s because Thinkalot’s classes always have too much theory for my liking.
Looking at your specific case, you’re talking about theories, not theory because you are talking about specific hypothesis and models which had bad assumptions, rather than suggesting that non-experimental analysis (and hence science itself) is inherently flawed and always had bad assumptions.
Time after time lots of theories and experiments have made wrong assumptions, but this was eventually overcome by getting better knowledge and employing that knowledge successfully.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : user2378 , Answer Author : Matt
