Reply To: Questions regarding DPF.

[Brian H]

Breakable wrote: Brian, I can agree that in that article they might have been talking about the original hypothesis where in Wikipedia they were talking about null hypothesis.
Still as far as I understand, failure to check for null hypothesis does not make the original hypothesis false.
Maybe it was not done because you cant learn anything new doing that. What do you think can be learned?

It’s a rigorous approach to science that maintains you can never be certain something is true, only that something is false. A speculation which offers a potential test which would disprove it if performed becomes a hypothesis. A hypothesis which has offered and survived many such tests is a theory. A theory which has survived every test anyone can think up (so far) is a law. But even “laws” can be updated and revised and supplanted by a more general and inclusive formulation (Einstein enfolded and included Newton). But Einstein’s theories are not yet compatible with quantum mechanics. And so on.

Certainty is unobtainable, but is the ever-receding goal.

It’s the only way you “learn”, since you never assume you know anything yet (which is a concrete barrier to learning), but always do your best to get there.