Quote Originally Posted by okiemax
(1)The meaning of the null hypothesis is ......................... . (2)The purpose of the null hypothesis is .......................
(1) A null hypothesis is a statement that two things are not different. The null hypothesis can be qualified by a number of variables (simply because in nature no two things are identical) but that is the essence of the meaning.

(2) The purpose of the null hypothesis is to reject it and and therefore examine an alternative hypothesis.

If you find that one guy that really has golden ears and can consistently hear a difference between two cables, then I do believe we can reject the general null hypothesis that all cables sound alike for cables of comparable gauge and length (see these are some of the qualifiers I was talking about). Now you can start investigating alternative hypothesis like what types of cables sound different and what kind of hearing is needed to detect those differences as well as how significant those differences are.

However, since we still don't even have one guy who can consistently show he can hear differences, that null hypothesis is still a pretty big matzah ball. We can't explore any alternative hypotheses because we haven't even rejected the null hyptothesis.

You and Robot seem to disagreeing about agreeing, if that even makes sense. The people who really can't grasp statistics or logic are to ones who demand that somebody needs to prove that the null hypothesis is true.