Of course, they may find the Higg's boson tomorrow, and then my little theory about them being wrong would be proved wrong, but that's science for you.

What motivated Einstein's work (and that of other, less successful theoretical physicists at the time) was the mathematical impossibility of classical mechanics and classical electrodynamics both being correct at the same time. After all, his paper that introduced special relativity was called "on the electrodynamics of moving bodies." There were no mirrors involved.

In other words, the Standard Model isn't even consistent above a TeV or so without the Higgs. Something has to give.

Edit: to make contact with your example, everyone knew that if you didn't find evidence for the ether, than the model of electromagnetism was very wrong. In fact, that was great justification for carrying out Michelson-Morely type experiments.

That assertion doesn't make sense as you invoke Einstein to support it. Einstein was a theoretical physicist. A more accurate and less sensationalistic assertion could have been : one theoretical model > another theoretical model.

In modern particle physics the main limitation is lack of experimental data. To get that data we have to build giant and expensive experiments like the LHC. Even if the LHC is completely successful we're still going to need bigger colliders to test other things at even higher energies.

Another problem is that the current theories make predictions about things that we probably won't ever be able to measure directly due to the microscopic scales involved.

To name an example. We think that gluons exist inside atomic nuclei, but we can't observe them unless we break the nuclei apart, thus destroying the gluon's habitat. We think it's there because we see what looks like the energy of a gluon falling apart, and because mathematical models back it up.

I presume you're using quotes around "failure" to remind us that, in fact, there has been no such thing.

We haven't explored the full energy range where our models suggest the Higgs boson(s) could live, and even where we have searched, we haven't accrued enough data for a statistically significant result--positive or negative.

Claiming we have failed to find the Higgs is like claiming tigers don't exist without leaving New York.

That's not the story I heard: Leon Lederman named the hypothesized Higgs boson the "God particle" as a joke, because its effects were everywhere yet nobody had ever seen it in the flesh--not because it was in any way powerful or dangerous or numinous or terrifying.

The Ptolemaic model, while ineffective at meeting the measurements of planetary movement, was a fairly simple, and elegant, mathematical model.

Somewhere out there in mind-space is someone who believes in anti-induction: each coin flip of heads convinces him that the coin is biased toward tails. Anti-induction tells him that, the more something has happened in the past, the less likely it is to do so in the future. If asked why he trusts anti-induction, he exclaims: "Because it's never worked before!"

That said, just because these two minds are possible in mind-space, doesn't mean that they're equally likely to form naturally in any given physical universe. In fact, to our intuition, one of the two seems particularly unlikely...

Credit to http://lesswrong.com/lw/t9/no_license_to_be_human/

But you'd be a fool to bet otherwise.

I think though that your argument is basically an 'appeal to ridicule' fallacy. You are making it sound like my statement is the philosophical equivalent of 'we can't be sure the sun will rise tomorrow'. It isn't, it is simple the statement that the current zoo of particles may well all be fundamental, with no 'simpler' theory underlying them.

Secondly, I think your statement that 'every single major advance in physics' has been a simplification is debatable.

Thirdly, extrapolating from that that every new advance will be found using the same heuristic is also debatable. If there really is to be a scientific breakthrough of the magnitude of a Newton, it seems likely (almost by definition) that it will be from an unexpected avenue of thought - seeing that the expected ones have been well researched and haven't been all that productive.

I guess it makes sense to bet on a unifying theory if you are a career particle physicist. There's a Nobel prize in it. It doesn't make sense to bet on the opposite notion, since there are probably no breakthroughs that way.

Likewise your simple statement that "the current zoo of particles may well all be fundamental, with no 'simpler' theory underlying them." is analogous to "the sun will collapse into a black hole tomorrow". Again, just a difference of degree.

[I should stress here that the justification for empiricism is an age-old philosophical problem which isn't easy to understand, much less solve. However, I think that a proper understanding of the history of physics gives very convincing (though maybe not the-sun-will-rise convincing) evidence that simplicity and beauty will be found at the bottom of the particle zoo.]

I don't understand what the true statement

>If there really is to be a scientific breakthrough of the magnitude of a Newton, it seems likely (almost by definition) that it will be from an unexpected avenue of thought - seeing that the expected ones have been well researched and haven't been all that productive.

has to do with our current discussion.

Lastly, (basically) no career particle physicist think that any Nobel prizes will be awarded for a unifying theory in their lifetime. (See, for instance, http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2998). Perhaps, if we're lucky, there will be a somewhat simplifying theory (which gets a Nobel prize) but that certainly couldn't come from the dominant research avenue, string theory.

Particle physicist have been expecting the next copernican revolution that replaces this model really soon now with the next accelerator upgrade since at least 1980 (look for example for conference talks by Haim Hariri from that time), but fundamental shifts don't happen that often.

If they count one doublet as 4 particles, two doublets would be 8 particles, right?

Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons.

They say the data points to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges.

Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and positive electric charge. This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model.

And:

The Standard Model only has one Higgs "doublet". Although we tend to think of the Higgs boson as one particle, it actually comes in a package of four, explained Dr Martin.

"In the Standard Model, you only see one of them because the other three are absorbed into [other parts of the scheme] such as the W and the Z bosons. There's only one left," he told BBC News.

"So if you want to add another Higgs doublet - you actually have to add four more particles."

> "In the Standard Model, you only see one of them because the other three are absorbed into [other parts of the scheme] such as the W and the Z bosons. There's only one left," he told BBC News.

> "So if you want to add another Higgs doublet - you actually have to add four more particles."

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/11/how-a-surfer--1...