quote:
How do you test whether or not a rock was formed in mountain building or a marine or desert environment? I KNOW how you HYPOTHESIZE that it was, I want to know how you CONFIRM your hypothesis.
Allow me, Faith, to explain this for you.
Hypothesis: this rock was formed in a marine environment.
a) Confirmation: the rock is grey or yellow, which means it was not exposed to the air as the ferric minerals in it have not oxidised.
b) Falsification: the rock is pink or red, which means it was exposed to the air as the ferric minerals in it have been oxidised.
If (a) is the case, our hypothesis has been confirmed by the evidence, so we go to another line of evidence and start again. If (b) is the case, our hypothesis has been falsified by the evidence, so we must discard it or modify it.
So: let's say (a) is the case, and we can continue with our hypothesis. We could move on to:
c) Confirmation: the presence of in-situ marine trace fossils
d) Falsification: the presence of in-situ terrestrial trace fossils
And so on.
Let's say (b) is the case. We must now discard our hypothesis - the depositional environment cannot have been marine if the sediments were oxidised. We can now postulate a new hypothesis - that the depositional environment was subaerial instead - and off we go again.
And that's how we test and confirm a hypothesis. We can have a lot of different ones at the start, but the only one that matters is the one that, once we have looked at all the available evidence, has not been falsified at the end.
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