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Experimental design: what is the hypothsis?
What hypothesis for the Boggett and Scarper experiment?
What hypotheses might the experimenters have asserted and tested
in the evaluation of their new system?
Remember that asserting a hypothesis implies that you know some way to test
whether it is true or not
In practice you are going to unable to prove that your hypothesis is
true, since however many times you repeated the experiment and found it to be
true, there is still the possibility that the next time it would be found to be
false. However, only one observation is necessary to disprove a
hypothesis. The normal experimental technique is to assert a null hypothesis,
complementary to your hypothesis, and the observations which will lead to it
being assumed disproved. If the null hypothesis is disproved, this implies that
your primary hypothesis (or some alternative hypothesis) can be assumed true,
at least for the present.
This may seem odd, but it is a perfectly standard procedure in the experimental
sciences.
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