Short answers, pulled from the story.
Statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. It is regarded as the science of uncertainty and as the technology of extracting information from data, and it is deeply related to mathematics and to fields such as physics, chemistry, and geography.
The word statistics ultimately comes from the Latin word Status, meaning situation or condition in society, which in late Latin took on the meaning state. The political scientist Gottfried Achenwall coined the German word statistik, and the term entered English in 1770 before gaining its modern meaning in the 1790s through John Sinclair's works.
Descriptive statistics summarize data from a sample using indexes such as the mean or standard deviation and do not assume the data come from a larger population. Inferential statistics draw conclusions about a population from a sample that is subject to random variation, for example by testing hypotheses and deriving estimates.
A Type I error occurs when the null hypothesis is falsely rejected, giving a false positive. A Type II error occurs when the null hypothesis fails to be rejected even though an actual difference exists, giving a false negative.
The Hawthorne study examined whether increased illumination would raise productivity among assembly line workers at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company. Productivity improved, but the study is heavily criticized for the lack of a control group and blindness, and it gave rise to the Hawthorne effect, the finding that an outcome can change due to observation itself.
The modern field emerged in three waves led by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, then William Sealy Gosset and Ronald Fisher, and finally Egon Pearson and Jerzy Neyman. Pearson founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London, and Fisher coined the term null hypothesis during the Lady tasting tea experiment.