Another area of scientific thinking where it’s possible to try to get unnecessarily rigorous is the distinction between hypotheses, theories, and laws. There is no underlying rule that allows us to classify each of these into neat groupings, and even the language itself is inconsistent. So this conversation ends up being more less accurate the more that we try to make it rigorous.
Typically, the word "hypothesis" is reserved for ideas we have that we are testing. For example, if we make a prediction about what is going to happen in a physics lab, we would typically call that idea a hypothesis. The whole point of making hypotheses is that it forces us to put our ideas into words that can be meaningfully tested for accuracy. After we make further observations (such as by running an experiment), we can then go back to those words and determine whether they were right or wrong (or at least mostly right or mostly wrong), and that leads us into the act of refining our ideas.
The words "theory" and "law" are actually much less precise. Some might try to talk about these as two different levels of knowledge and testability, where a "theory" is an idea that has been well-tested, but a "law" is so well-tested that we just don’t ever expect it to be violated. However, this just isn’t the case in physics.
For example, there’s something known as "Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation" that is a formula that we can use to calculate the force of gravity between any two objects. The problem with this "law" is that it’s not actually a law. The reason is that the law isn’t perfectly correct. There are many observations we can make that would violate this law, such as looking at the orbits of planets around the sun. (If you measure things accurately enough, you would discover that the predictions are close, but not quite correct.)
There’s also "Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity" which (among other things) establishes the idea that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Up to this point, there are no known violations of this. And so it would seem we should call this a "law" instead of a theory. But the language around this is so deeply rooted in history that it’s a change that will never happen.
Ultimately, a better word for these is to call them "models." A model is just a particular representation of a scientific idea. A model makes no declarations about what is "true" about the universe. It simply says that under a certain set of assumptions, we would expect the universe to behave in a certain way. Whether or not that happens in reality is an entirely different question. In physics, it’s very common to be working in the framework of models instead of debating between theories and laws.
For example, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation gives us a formula for how much force we expect there to be between two massive objects, and it is known to be accurate when the masses aren’t too large. But when the objects get larger, we may have to turn to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to make better predictions.
Our approach to physics will be built around creating models for various situations. Those models will give us a theoretical foundation with which to analyze what might happen, and we will discuss things that can happen that will cause those models to fail.