Lol, "discovered" is a word only a realist would use. Physics has been unreal for about a century. Does spacetime exist? Do photons exist, and if they do, exactly when and where? Wave particle duality challenges our notion of what it means to exist. A learned realist might choose the fields to exist, but then what is a field and can I buy one on eBay? Are there many electrons in the universe or ? These are questions for philosophy not physics, like the many unfalsifiable interpretations of quantum mechanics. Physics is naming mathematical structures that make predictions. That's it. The Higgs Boson exists but only as math. An observation was predicted and then occured. Does that make it real? I don't know. No one knows. But this isn't unique to the Higgs. It's the problem with everything.
Lol, "discovered" is a word only a realist would use. Physics has been unreal for about a century. Does spacetime exist? Do photons exist, and if they do, exactly when and where? Wave particle duality challenges our notion of what it means to exist. A learned realist might choose the fields to exist, but then what is a field and can I buy one on eBay? Are there many electrons in the universe or [only one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe)? These are questions for philosophy not physics, like the many unfalsifiable interpretations of quantum mechanics. Physics is naming mathematical structures that make predictions. That's it. The Higgs Boson exists but only as math. An observation was predicted and then occured. Does that make it real? I don't know. No one knows. But this isn't unique to the Higgs. It's the problem with everything.
(post is archived)