If you’re the researcher who developed the new drug, the null hypothesis is the thing that keeps you up at night. Unless you can rule it out, you don’t know whether you’re on the trail of a medical breakthrough or just barking up the wrong metabolic pathway. So how do you rule it out? The standard framework, called the null hypothesis significance test, was developed in its most commonly used form by R. A. Fisher, the founder of the modern practice of statistics,* in the early twentieth century.
