Hypothesis vs Imaginary - What's the difference?
hypothesis | imaginary |
(sciences) Used loosely, a tentative conjecture explaining an observation, phenomenon or scientific problem that can be tested by further observation, investigation and/or experimentation. As a scientific term of art, see the attached quotation. Compare to theory, and quotation given there.
* 2005 , Ronald H. Pine, http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/intelligent_design_or_no_model_creationism, 15 October 2005:
(general) An assumption taken to be true for the purpose of argument or investigation.
(grammar) The antecedent of a conditional statement.
existing only in the imagination
* Addison
(mathematics) of a number, having no real part; that part of a complex number which is a multiple of the square root of -1.
Imagination; fancy.
* 2002 , , The Great Nation , Penguin 2003, p. 324:
(mathematics) An imaginary quantity.
As nouns the difference between hypothesis and imaginary
is that hypothesis is used loosely, a tentative conjecture explaining an observation, phenomenon or scientific problem that can be tested by further observation, investigation and/or experimentation. As a scientific term of art, see the attached quotation. Compare to theory, and quotation given there while imaginary is imagination; fancy.As an adjective imaginary is
existing only in the imagination.hypothesis
English
(wikipedia hypothesis)Noun
(hypotheses)- Far too many of us have been taught in school that a scientist, in the course of trying to figure something out, will first come up with a "hypothesis" (a guess or surmise—not necessarily even an "educated" guess). ... [But t]he word "hypothesis" should be used, in science, exclusively for a reasoned, sensible, knowledge-informed explanation for why some phenomenon exists or occurs. An hypothesis can be as yet untested; can have already been tested; may have been falsified; may have not yet been falsified, although tested; or may have been tested in a myriad of ways countless times without being falsified; and it may come to be universally accepted by the scientific community. An understanding of the word "hypothesis," as used in science, requires a grasp of the principles underlying Occam's Razor and Karl Popper's thought in regard to "falsifiability"—including the notion that any respectable scientific hypothesis must, in principle, be "capable of" being proven wrong (if it should, in fact, just happen to be wrong), but none can ever be proved to be true. One aspect of a proper understanding of the word "hypothesis," as used in science, is that only a vanishingly small percentage of hypotheses could ever potentially become a theory.
Synonyms
* supposition * theory * thesis * educated guess * guess * See alsoDerived terms
* hypothesize * hypothetic * hypothetical * hypotheticallyimaginary
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- Wilt thou add to all the griefs I suffer / Imaginary ills and fancied tortures?
Derived terms
* imaginarily * imaginarinessNoun
(imaginaries)- By then too Mozart's opera, from Da Ponte's libretto, had made Figaro a stock character in the European imaginary and set the whole Continent whistling Mozartian airs and chuckling at Figaresque humour.