While it not possible to disprove the existence, of, say, unicorns. It is possible to say "I've searched the length and breadth of Central Park, looking for unicorns with 99.9% detection probability for each square meter of the park. I found no unicorns."
Whether you find this sufficient to reasonably exclude any unicorn hypotheses is up to you and will depend upon whatever unicorn hypothesis you wish to test. If the hypothesis is that the world should be uniformly populated with unicorns once every hundred meters, then the above observation should place strong constraints on the viability of the hypothesis, as about 340 unicorns should have been observed.
In the case of the Higgs, had the signal not popped up, they would have been able to exclude any Higgs-like particle over a huge range, which includes the now-claimed value. At the present mass, with the data up till now, they would have excluded a Standard Higgs to better than 5-sigma (less than a one in a million chance that they missed it).
Want to see the one of the peaks as it forms? (you have to trust that the scientists are doing the analysis right before they make this plot)
All scientists should take philosophy of science, IMHO, to avoid the misunderstanding of te scientific method that comes from dogmatic belief in it. I would guess most scientists don't know the difference between an inductive and deductive proof, both of which are crucial for scientific progress.
While it not possible to disprove the existence, of, say, unicorns. It is possible to say "I've searched the length and breadth of Central Park, looking for unicorns with 99.9% detection probability for each square meter of the park. I found no unicorns."
Whether you find this sufficient to reasonably exclude any unicorn hypotheses is up to you and will depend upon whatever unicorn hypothesis you wish to test. If the hypothesis is that the world should be uniformly populated with unicorns once every hundred meters, then the above observation should place strong constraints on the viability of the hypothesis, as about 340 unicorns should have been observed.
In the case of the Higgs, had the signal not popped up, they would have been able to exclude any Higgs-like particle over a huge range, which includes the now-claimed value. At the present mass, with the data up till now, they would have excluded a Standard Higgs to better than 5-sigma (less than a one in a million chance that they missed it).
Want to see the one of the peaks as it forms? (you have to trust that the scientists are doing the analysis right before they make this plot)
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/AtlasPublic/HiggsPublicResul...