Scientific law predicts the result of certain initial conditions.
Ex: How far a baseball travels when launched at a certain angle.
Law predicts what happens.
Laws usually resist change since they wouldn’t have been adopted if they didn’t fit the data. Though we occasionally revise laws in the face of new unexpected information.
A good scientific law is a finely-tuned machine, accomplishing its task brilliantly, but ignorant of why it works as well as it does.
Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation:
every point mass attracts every other point mass in the universe with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers
It is mathematically precise and consistently observed.
a phenomenon is an observable event, a scientific theory provides an explanation of why it occurs, and a scientific law describes what happens, often in a precise mathematical form, without necessarily explaining the underlying cause.