Reflection on the History of Hypothesis

                Throughout secondary education, I had been told to have hypotheses for each experiment I ran. I never really thought anything of it, other than complaining that I had to do more work. Experimentation without a hypothesis was never taught to me before college. The teachers aren’t to blame for this, though. Most of the experiments we ran were learning experiences trying to use what we learned to predict what would happen and see the concepts we were being taught in action. It would be unreasonable to expect a fifth grader to do intensive research projects that professors, scientists, and college students are often involved in. For one, they most likely wouldn’t be able to grasp what was going on. Secondly, they probably wouldn’t have the attention span to make it even worth attempting.

Image of Algol taken by my professor and I on the night of 9/03/2010.

                Whether or not you will have a hypothesis really depends on what type of research you are doing. Hypotheses are still quite useful in most experiments, such as attempting to validate a result from experiments similar to the one you are running. There are other times when a hypothesis is useless, such as mapping the human genome. There are so many possibilities for the genome that making a hypothesis would be impossible. In the research I am performing on a variable star, I am attempting to find values such as the mass of the binary star system and its distance from us. There is no use for a prediction or hypothesis in that instance. 

                As mentioned in the article “A Brief History of Hypothesis”₁, hypotheses can also cause a bias when attempting to perform an experiment. For instance, there was recently a group that claimed that vaccines were the cause of the development of autism in children. Studies were performed that found no correlation between vaccines and autism. The group then claimed that the studies were biased. So more studies were done, and there was still no proof. Long story short, the group didn’t accept any study that didn’t agree with their idea. As you can see, such a bias would cause a lot of difficulties when performing a study like that. It is also a large waste of resources. Science should ideally be unbiased, but humans by nature are biased creatures. This is the root of many of our problems, not only the scientific ones.

                For the type of research I want to do when I finish my graduate studies, hypotheses will be a must. My ultimate goal with education is to become a theoretical physicist, like Carl Sagan, Einstein, or Stephen Hawking. The goal of a theoretical physicist is to come up with explanations for happenings in the universe that we don’t understand. Sometimes these theories become widely accepted laws or ideas. Examples of these are the Big Bang theory, gravity, black holes, and relativity. But even laws are only strong hypotheses based on what we’ve experienced in our region of space and time. Theoretically, everything could change tomorrow. Gravity could start pushing instead of pulling and time could stop, but that is extremely unlikely, which is why gravity and relativity are not questioned.

                The usefulness of hypotheses really depends on the research you are doing. If your question could be answered by a numerical value or a sequence of proteins, etc, then a hypothesis would most likely do you no good whatsoever. If, however, you are predicting the outcome of adding a certain chemical to a compound, then a hypothesis would be useful.

Sources

1.       Glass, David J., and Ned Hall. "A Brief History of the Hypothesis." Cell. 134. (2008): 378-381. Print.