Hypothesis.

I am mildly perturbed by a recent uptick in the disparagement of science and the scientists that practice the craft. These discussions often involve two components: (1) scientists really don’t know anything and are just guessing; (2) The things they *think* they know are just theories.

Scientists do make guesses and those guesses are called hypotheses. These ideas are put forward with as much knowledge as is known or observed at the time, and are then subject to rigorous and prolonged testing by people that “believe” the hypothesis and by those that do not. This testing process, done properly, gains as much understanding through an unsuccessful test — one that fails to support the hypothesis — as an successful one. In this sense both outcomes are equally valuable in the unbiased pursuit of knowledge, because a negative result can help us avoid the abyss, a place we need not go, unless you are a shadowy *abyss scientist*.

Suppose I form a hypothesis that the moon in the sky is a giant ball of mozzarella cheese.  I further suggest that if we could ever get there we could have pizza uninterrupted for the next 11 billion years.  After going there we discovered, through observation and testing, that the moon was cheese-less and our hypothesis had to be abandon.  If you run out of pizza this weekend, don’t blame me.

Only after a hypothesis has survived the gauntlet of testing does it move gradually into the category of theory. The testing of theories really never stops because each tested theory provides a stepping stone to the next hypothesis, and so on. For example, *gravity* is still a theory even though it behaves precisely as predicted over hundreds of years.  Moon cheese didn’t make the cut.

This method of systematic discovery seems to “work” in the sense that our modern world is built on the results.  I mean omg, airplanes *fly*.  How is that even POSSIBLE?

We humans have been blessed with the ability to figure things out and I personally find this process of discovery to be one of the many good things about our species. Well, that and baseball.