I googled, 'distinguishing between theory lower case t and Theory upper case T'. The result that came up with the following quote was, I was amused to see, from a Judith Curry - and I wonder whether this was one of the names of the AoM some months ago who believes she communicates with spirits, but in any case this was the text underh the link on the Google page:

Quote

In fact, there's a lot of weird, little anomalies that tell us we don't have this ... They went from a jumble of lowercase theories to an uppercase Theory. ... As far as I can tell, a lower case theory is equivalent to an hypothesis ... The biggest difference between a law and a theory

I went briefly to the link, and I might spend some more time this afternoon looking further, but in the years of learning from and posting on forums, I have seen a distinction pointed out many times to those who do not think which to use, t or T. I am always careful to stop and consider before deciding.
If there is not a distinction between the word with a t and with a T, how do scientists know whether they are talking about a tried and tested Theory, or the opposite!

Susan