Hypotheses
The Basic Idea
Your favourite part of summer is experimenting in your garden; this year you've decided to try your hand at tomato plants. But no matter what you try, you can’t seem to get the tomatoes to ripen! You decide to add some fertilizer, guessing that it will help your tomatoes. You might not know it, but you just became one step closer to being a scientist.
A hypothesis (pluralized as hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a specific observation.1 Specifically, it attempts to describe the relationship between an independent variable (the variable that is manipulated) and a dependent variable (the variable that is being measured). In the gardening situation, the hypothesis that adding fertilizer will help the tomatoes ripen is proposing that a lack of fertilizer was impeding the process. The presence or absence of fertilizer is the independent variable and the tomato’s ripeness is the dependent variable. In order for a hypothesis to be scientific, it must be testable and thus falsifiable. Hypotheses are based on existing scientific data, personal experience, or intuition.
There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.
– Enrico Fermi, Italian physicist and the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor
