I feel as though I'm getting a bit bogged down with the Higgs issue, possibly because I'm not able to spend a reasonable length of time on it. Coming back for a few minutes now and again is certainly not the best approach.
I'm going to try recapping a few things - one at a time.
Orac, I suspect you are going to disagree with this one, but it's just a thought, out there for comment.
The question arises as to how much difference the discovery of the Higgs particle might make to the future of physics. At an intuitive level this would seem to depend to some extent on the nature of the discovered particle/field. The Higgs has been a theoretical part of the standard model for a few decades, and a lot of work has been done on it. If the Higgs is as per standard model, it seems reasonable to suppose that its discovery would make very little difference to the immediate course of physics. On the other hand, if it turns out that the Higgs is very different from predictions, or if there turned out to be more than one Higgs particle, there would need to be quite a lot of rethinking of theories.
