That must be crushing. My brother is going down this path after moving to the south. I know it weighs heavily on my parents and I can’t imagine it.

I almost went down that path myself with the libertarian party before the tea party came to being. This is the brother I was closest to growing up. I never understood how siblings could drift so apart throughout life. I really hope we don’t have the same fate.

Yes, gravity is a theory. In scientific terms, theories are proven, repeatable, and accepted. It’s the most robust and strongest form of scientific “fact” we have (since new discoveries can change our understanding, we can’t honestly declare it indisputably factual).

When people say “I have a theory…” they usually mean “I have a hypothesis…” which is some idea or problem statement that is unproven, untested, unverified.

OP was playing off the conflation of those two things.