Gerald:

I would appreciate some additional input into the accuracy of my statement about a hypothesis only being able to be disproven. I have conducted considerable research into the subject of testing a hypothesis and based on all the documents, papers written, training courses, and discussion with those in the scientific research field I have not found any data that disproves my hypothesis that a hypothesis can only be disproved. One of the sources of my data was the internet. I did a search on the internet by using the search criterion of “hypothesis”, “philosophy”, and “never prove”. The information I obtained from all sources is similar to the following that was produced by P. Compton and R. Jansen, Garvan Institute of Medical Research, St. Vincent's Hospital, Sydney 2010, Australia. They stated in their paper:

"This maintenance experience suggests that knowledge is not sometimes, but always given in context and so can only be relied on to be true in that context. The best philosophical foundation for this seems to be the philosophy of Karl Popper (Popper 1963). Popper suggests that we can never prove a hypothesis, we can only disprove hypotheses. Obviously we cannot disprove all alternate hypotheses, we may not even be able to formulate all the alternatives. What we can only do is to disprove the limited number of likely alternatives. We suggest that this explains the phenomenon in knowledge acquisition that knowledge, the rules for reaching some conclusion, always seem to be context dependant. What the expert is doing is identifying features in the data that enable one to conclude that a certain interpretation is preferable to the small set of other likely interpretations, and of course the likely alternatives depend on the context. This is quite different from reporting on how one reached a given conclusion. These are not novel suggestions."

As this is only a hypothesis on my part, all I can say is that the information found fails to disprove my hypothesis, it by no means is proof that my hypothesis is correct. If you or others have information that does show a hypothesis can be proved to be correct through testing I would appreciate that information.