Planet Nine Null Hypothesis

I was listening to a podcast yesterday, http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/the-ninth-planet , an interview with the scientist that ruined many a people's childhood by demoting Pluto's status as a planet.  He was on the show talking about his new finding and search, there is another planet out there; a new planet nine.  

The discussion about how his team knew there was another planet out there and all the ways they looked for it and even though it has not been observed, they know so much about the planet already.  For example, they know it is about ten times the mass of the Earth.  They know that the orbit is highly elliptical.  They know that it's orbit takes about 15,000 years to complete and they know what the the orbital path it must follow, but they don't know where it is.

The entire process that he did to determine these facts was also interesting because he used the Scientific Method to determine everything.  People need to know that to be a successful scientist you have to fail a lot.  The best scientist fails a lot.  The scientist asks a question and then she tries to prove it.  Sometimes he succeeds, but success does not tell us anything important.  Throw a dart at a mountain.  If you hit you know it is there but you know nothing of the edge or the top, you just know you hit the mountain.  If you miss that tells you that the mountain is not there and you need to throw your dart another place.

It is called the Null Hypothesis.  Not succeeding tell you more about what you are looking at.  There was once an Internet post that asked people to give the formula that fit for the following sample of numbers: 1, 8, 64, 256.  People were given three guesses to figure out what the formula was.  Most people failed to find the correct formula because all of the following formula worked y=x^3, y=x^2, y=x^4; they all worked.  These also worked: y=x+10, y=x+2 or y=x+1.  Those are actually all the same formulas, at least on one level.  Formulas that don't work are: y=root x, y=x+.5 and other of these types of equations.  People who asked these questions would able to determine that the formula was y=x+1, by trying to find out what the formula was not.  The answer was a set of numbers that were all Real Numbers.  

So this scientist was not looking for a planet to fit all the observable data, he was looking for everything else and failed to find it.  As Sherlock Holmes was said to have said, "After ruling out all the most probable explanations, what ever is left, no matter how improbable, most be true."