what is electrical theory? also is it just called that because you cant see it?
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They’d mean that in the sense of a scientific theory, so it means it’s a set of rules that make accurate predictions and are a useful way to think about what’s happening even though we can’t directly confirm it with our senses. It doesn’t mean a wild-ass guess, like many people mean when they say the word ‘theory’.
It includes ideas like electrons (little particles you can’t see, which move through wire kind of like water through pipes), voltage (the energy the electrons have), current (how much electron flow there is) resistance (how blocked-up or narrow the pipes are), and lots, lots more.
The way the word “theory” is used in science is very different to how it is used in everyday language.
In colloquial speech, we use “theory” to denote an explanation that you have come up with, but for which you have no proof.
In science, you have a number of observations (in this case, e.g. a lamp lights up when you complete an electric circuit), and you try to find an explanation that explains these phenomena (e.g. there are electrons flowing from one pole of the battery to another). And as long as this theory is seen as the best explanation for the observed phenomena, we say that it “holds”.
So in a way you are right that it is called “theory” because we can’t see (= directly observe) electrons. We just found that the kind of behaviour that we observe is best explained by our current theories.
If tomorrow somebody comes up with a better theory (i.e. that explains all that the current theory explains and other things that current theory can not explain) it might well replace the current theory. However, that is of course rather unlikely to happen.
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