Hypothesis Generation
Hypothesis Generation
[Miss Lenhart stands in front of a blackboard with various unreadable scribbles, gesturing towards it with a pointer.] Miss Lenhart: To do science, you generate a hypothesis, then test it.
[Cueball is sitting at a desk, raising his hand.] Cueball: But how do you generate a hypothesis?
[Miss Lenhart now stands in front of Cueball's desk, she is holding down the pointer and Cueball has his hands on his legs.] Miss Lenhart: Great question. How do you think you do it? Cueball: Well, maybe you - Miss Lenhart: And there you have it!

Miss Lenhart is teaching a science class and starts by formulating the fact that to perform any science you need to generate a hypothesis in order to test it.
The front row student, Cueball (presumably the rest of the students in the class are off panel), is thus prompted to ask the salient question of how one finds an original hypothesis. By using a clever prompting question in reply, Miss Lenhart allows the student to discover the answer himself. In typical Miss Lenhart fashion she is a bit rude, interrupting him before he can even formulate his thoughts. But the idea that he even has gotten an idea to share is proof that he has made a hypothesis about how to generate a hypothesis. This does not, however, answer how he did it, but now he knows he can do it.
This approach may not have worked with less eager/capable students, so it highlights the strengths of both the student and the teacher - and that she had a good understanding of the student's ability to reason this out with just the barest of guidance. Or perhaps it is just another prank by Miss Lenhart .
The key aspect being conveyed in this simple exchange is that one of the many good practices in science (no matter the aspect, though the specifics may change according to the precise field of study) is that one should first have an idea of what you can test and then perform the test to confirm (or rule out) your idea.
In the title text the joke is that it is thus very easy to make hypotheses and thus everyone makes them all the time, so there are numerous ones to test. And the now frazzled scientists that are trying to work their way through them request that everyone stop making new hypotheses until they have worked their way through the huge backlog of untested hypotheses already made.
[Miss Lenhart stands in front of a blackboard with various unreadable scribbles, gesturing towards it with a pointer.] Miss Lenhart: To do science, you generate a hypothesis, then test it.
[Cueball is sitting at a desk, raising his hand.] Cueball: But how do you generate a hypothesis?
[Miss Lenhart now stands in front of Cueball's desk, she is holding down the pointer and Cueball has his hands on his legs.] Miss Lenhart: Great question. How do you think you do it? Cueball: Well, maybe you - Miss Lenhart: And there you have it!
