[Condorman]

The empirical process moves from hypothesis, to observation, to theory, to experiment, to fact...Did they change it after all these centuries?

I don't know how well you remember the mid 18th century, but it was about that time that-- Okay, the short answer is that the process you describe is not correct.

The scientific process is designed to model reality. The more observations we gather, the more accurate our approximations can be. Theories and hypotheses are our attempts to wrap an explanation around a bunch of facts. The theory itself is not fact.

You might be interested to learn what makes a good theory. But keep in mind, that, as Stephen Hawking writes:

"Any physical theory is provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory."

[PatrickHenry]

"Keeping the thread alive" bump.