I first ran across this idea many years ago reading Karl Popper, The Logic of
Scientific Discovery.  His basic premises are:

- Physical "laws" are actually hypotheses stated in a manner that allows
independent testing of specific physical (observable) phenomena.

- No matter how often a hypothesis is tested, it can never be proven.  It
only takes one contrary observation to invalidate a hypothesis that had
previously been accepted.  A useful anecdote relates to the amount of
"proof" provided for Newtonian physics over many years -- until Einstein
said, "wait a minute, this doesn't work and I have a different hypothesis".

In order to conduct our daily lives, we have to accept many hypotheses that
have been corroborated, but not proven -- as Newtonian physics, they are
good enough for our normal use.  As our knowledge and understanding grows,
some "laws" may fall to new understanding (read: hacks) while others survive
to fall another day.  The set of hypotheses we choose to accept as "laws" is
determined by the level of risk we are willing to assume, in the world and
in security.