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First you observe, then you fomrulate a hypothesis, then you run tests come up with a theory. Finally, when everything is worked out and you understand all the detail and can explain everything in provable fashion, you formualte a law.

This is known as the "scientific method".

Every kid learns it in high school science if he is paying attention to the teacher, and not to the cute chick sitting next to him. I wasn't paying attention to the teacher in High School, so I learned it in college when there were only guys sitting around me.

Think of the gas laws as opposed to thermodynamic theory.

Sure, and I think that makes my point that theories do not become laws, but instead that theories explain laws. The Kinetic Theory of Gases explains Boyle's Law. (The Kinetic Theory of Gases suggested that gases may be conceived as composed of molecules that act like little billiard balls, and Boyles Law quantified the relation between the volume and pressure of a gas assuming constant temperature. The Kinetic Theory provides a mechanism to account for why pressure increases as volume decreases, e.g. because a halving of volume doubles the number of molecules striking the interior walls of the gas' container.)

Note also Boyle' Law (1662) historically preceeded The Kinetic Theory of Gases (1738) by a considerable margin.

How does a theory graduate to the alledgely higher status of a law when the law came before the theory? Indeed this particular instance conforms to the general case. Descriptive laws usually do preceed corresponding explanatory laws. The same is true, for instance, in the case of gravity. In fact, hundreds of years after Newton provided us with the laws describing and predicting it's behavior, we still do not have a complete and satisfactory theory of gravity.