Since antiquity, human beings have sought to understand the workings of nature: why unsupported objects drop to the ground, why different
materials have different properties, the character of the
universe such as the form of the
Earth and the behavior of celestial objects such as the
Sun and the
Moon, and so forth. Typically the behavior and nature of the world was explained by invoking the actions of
gods. Eventually explanations were proposed based on
philosophical speculation. Rarely verified by systematic
experimental testing, many of them were wrong, but this is part of the
dialectical nature of scientific enquiry, and even modern theories of
quantum mechanics and
relativity are merely considered "theories that have not been broken yet".
See more at Wikipedia.org...