Observation vs Hypothesis - What's the difference?
observation | hypothesis |
The act of observing, and the fact of being observed.
*
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, passage=But Miss Thorn relieved the situation by laughing aloud,
* {{quote-magazine, year=2012, month=March-April, author=(Jeremy Bernstein)
, volume=100, issue=2, page=146, magazine=(American Scientist)
, title= The act of noting and recording some event; or the record of such noting.
A remark or comment.
* Shakespeare
* Alexander Pope
A judgement based on observing.
Performance of what is prescribed; adherence in practice; observance.
* Jeremy Taylor
(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.
As nouns the difference between observation and hypothesis
is that observation is the act of observing, and the fact of being observed while 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.observation
English
Noun
(en noun)A Palette of Particles, passage=The physics of elementary particles in the 20th century was distinguished by the observation of particles whose existence had been predicted by theorists sometimes decades earlier.}}
- That's a foolish observation .
- To observations which ourselves we make / We grow more partial for the observer's sake.
- We are to procure dispensation or leave to omit the observation of it in such circumstances.
Derived terms
* observation carSee also
* (wikipedia "observation")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.