Possible higgs discovery.

[DeltaV]

Granted, R=255, G=128, B=128 looks pink. But Alpha=0 would've had to have been stated as an a priori condition.

[TallDave]

you are saying that a hypothesis should not be promoted to a theory till the experimental evidence is in.

No, wrong, that is not what I am saying.

How can you really, truly know that you have 'NOT found' something?

Reference Karl Popper, pseudo-science, unfalsifiable hypotheses.

I thought that's what you meant.

On the topic of 'dis-proving' something, I took a computer science class once upon a time which dealt with logical and mathematical proofs. One of the topics discussed was proving a negative. Maybe it's impossible or just really hard to do this with the Higgs Boson, but, can't scientists sometimes prove the non-existence of something (or, more accurately, the invalidity of the hypothesis of a things existence) by doing a sort of Proof-By-Contradiction.

What I mean is, if I remember correctly, in a Proof-By-Contradiction, you start with two things: 1) one or more things you already know to be true, and 2) by assuming the thing you are trying to prove false is correct (that is, you are trying to prove it's false, so you assume it is true), then show that if it the idea being tested is true, it leads to a result that contradicts the thing(s) you previously already knew to be true, so the second thing must be false.

Can't experiments sometimes do something like that to definitively falsify a theory?

You can falsify a theory that way, but not prove it -- i.e., icarus is right. "Not A, therefore B" only works in finite sets (ruling out all other possibilities, leaving the correct one). The set of possible physical theories is not finite.

[GIThruster]

There are more than a hundred different versions of the Standard Model with regards Higgs. Some provide exhaustive disjunctions "If not a, then b" and some do not, so the remains are both inductive and deductive.

What this means is, if no Higgs is found, some of these versions will fall to the wayside and others will not. The theory will certainly survive and move on.

[Jeff Mauldin]

Last week I was reading some interesting stuff (likely familiar to many here) about Kuhn and his book about scientific revolutions.

here's one line about it (a course outline from a professor at Emory)

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html

Some key points related to this discussion seem to be:
1) No scientific theory (the standard model of physics in this case) explains everything
2) The process of "normal science," meaning not during scientific revolutions, is for scientists to work towards using the prevailing paradigm to explore the things unexplained by the current paradigm (i.e. where particle physics has been for a while)
3) Scientific revolutions occur when another paradigm ultimately, in the eyes of the general population of older and up-and-coming scientists, does a better job of explaining more stuff (again, not everything). Before a revolution occurs scientists try to use the existing paradigm to explain things better explained by the new paradigm. (epicycles vs. kepler/gallileo might be a good example here.) If the old paradigm ultimately does as good a job as the new paradigm, there ends up being no revolution. This process isn't really a bad thing as you can't have any normal progess assuming every difficult result is a revolution, but you can't have real deepening of understanding without the revolutions.
4) The existence and importance of the unexplained phenomenon (including new things discovered) helps drive this process.

My not-too-well-thought-out idea is that we have been in 'normal science' mode for particle physics/standard theory for a long time. String theory is trying to be a new paradigm, but doesn't seem (so far) to being a good enough explainatory and predicitive job to be a successful revolution. Plasma Cosmology/the electric universe/non-special-relativity theories look to me to be some kind of unlikely dark horse paradigm right now (but they could take off if they explain some things and make some good predictions). If we don't find the higgs boson that would be likely to generate enough pressure for some kind of revolution. If we find it, things will stay pretty status-quo.

[Jeff Mauldin]

I should also throw "modified gravity" theories into the contender list for future scientifc revolutions. There are probably others, but, as I implied in the last post, I'm just trying to throw this out there.