16.2: Hypothesis- Or, What Do We Learn From this Work?

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Classically, a hypothesis is a proposed explanation for an observed phenomenon. From this, the hypothesis has emerged as the corner stone of the scientific method and is a very efficient way to organize your thoughts and come up with a one sentence summary of your work. A proper formulation of your hypothesis should directly lead to the method that you have chosen to test your hypothesis. A good way to think about your hypothesis is “What do you want to learn?” or “What do we learn from this work?”.

It can be somewhat hard to actually frame your work into a single sentence, so what to do if a single hypothesis seems not to apply? One reason might be that you are actually trying to accomplish too many things. Can you really describe them all in depth in a 6-page document? If yes, maybe some are very minor compared to the others. If this is the case, they are either supportive of your main idea and can be rolled into this bigger piece of work or they are totally disconnected. If they are disconnected, leave them out for the sake of improving the conciseness of your main message. Finally, you might feel that you don’t have a main message, but consider all the things you have done to be equally worthy, and despite answering the Heilmeier questions you cannot fill up more than three pages. In this case you might consider picking one of your approaches and dig deeper by comparing it with different methods.

Being able to come up with a one-sentence elevator pitch framed as a hypothesis will actually help you to set the scope of the work that you need to do for a research or class project.

How good do you need to implement, design or describe a certain component of your project? Well, good enough to follow through with your research objective.