If science does not claim to arrive at absolute, definitive truth, then what are scientific laws? Doesn't the existence of a law imply the existence of a truth, not to mention a lawgiver? And if science does not provide us with truth, does that mean that science does not deal with facts? There can be a lot of confusion about the concepts of laws and facts within scientific research, and one result has been erroneous impressions not just about what these categories are, but also about how science itself works. That is why it is necessary to take some time to clear up this terminology. The concept law of science is an inheritance from the earliest days of science when it was believed that the universe operated in the way it did because God established natural laws which dictated how things should act. Of course, everything but humans followed these laws, and so the movement of objects could be accurately predicted simply by coming to better understand the laws created by God. In this way, science in its infancy was very close to theology. Over time, the premise of a lawgiver who established the workings of nature was abandoned in favor of a naturalistic position. The concept of laws of science or natural laws, however, remained - it had become a standard means of expression which stuck like a bad habit. We can still see it today used in textbooks to refer to basic principles of how nature works.
One common means of explaining the continued use of this concept is to say that it refers to broad and general regularities in the behavior of matter and/or energy which occur over a wide ranges of space and time and which have been observed so many times that future changes are no longer given much consideration. This is plausible in theory, but problematic in practice. If we look through, say, a physics textbook to examine how the terms law and theory are actually used, we won't find that the above criteria are the deciding factor. Instead, we simply find that law is used with regularities which were discovered a long time ago while theory is applied to regularities discovered much more recently. That's why we have Newton's first law of motion rather than Newton's first theory of motion and Einstein's special theory of relativity rather than Einstein's special law of relativity. Perhaps it would be preferable if the term law were abandoned entirely - it certainly aids and abets those who are under the mistaken impression that science continues to operate under the premise of a lawgiver directing the events in nature. Unfortunately, such a change is unlikely - there is simply too much momentum from tradition and history preventing it.