Well, I remember wondering as a graduate student how how one was supposed to go about deciding what problems to work on, and not coming up with a good answer . A fellow student suggested that your project is worth working on if you can get it funded, but I think he was kidding. Or maybe not.

Most experimentalists really aren't in the business of supporting or refuting hypotheses as such. It's more a matter of making a measurement, and yes they will be comparing their results to theoretical predictions, but ideally experimentalists should be disinterested in the result, that is, they care about making as accurate a measurement as possible but don't have any a priori preference of one value over another.