Natanael

Physicists tends to work with precision in decimals, not multiple orders of magnitude. They didn't know it would be there either, all they knew is the theory they had would be simpler if it was there than not.

Your quote from the website is a bad attempt at backdating current knowledge from very recent research and experiments to the original discoverers

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-higgs-boson-ruined-peter-higgss-life/

The discovery of the Higgs boson came nearly 50 years after Higgs’s prediction, and he said he never expected it to be found in his lifetime.

It's not even known if there's more than one Higgs boson, because the theory allows multiple variants.

Look at that graph of how many different variants would decay differently;

https://home.cern/news/series/lhc-physics-ten/higgs-boson-revealing-natures-secrets

They had thousands of different predictions and couldn't know which were right until the data was in.

If, due to its mass, they could only observe the interplay between the Higgs boson on one hand and the W and Z bosons on the other, the puzzle of the fermion masses would remain unsolved. Discovering the particle at a convenient mass was an unexpected kindness from nature. If it were slightly more massive, above 180 GeV or so, the options to study it at the time of its discovery would have been more limited.

The variety of available transformation products means that data from the individual channels can be combined together through sophisticated techniques to build up a greater understanding of the particle. “Doing so is not trivial,” says Giovanni Petrucciani, co-convener of the Higgs analysis group in CMS. “You have to treat the uncertainties similarly across all the individual analyses and interpret the results carefully, once you have applied complicated statistical machinery.” Combining data from the transformation of the Higgs boson to pairs of Z bosons and pairs of photons allowed ATLAS and CMS to discover the Higgs boson in 2012.

It was legitimately not known if we could find it. It could have been big enough that LHC would've failed, and then it could have taken us 50 more years to build a collider large enough (mostly due to cost, but still)

In fact they're only mostly sure still

Yet, the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism remains among the least-understood phenomena in the Standard Model. Indeed, while scientists have dropped the “-like” suffix and have understood the Higgs boson remarkably since its discovery, they still do not know if what was observed is the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model.

You don't even understand what I'm saying, how can you accuse me of walking back?

You keep making unjustified claims even now. What if a simulator knows what you're looking at and simply don't mess with that? Clearly not impossible. Implausible? Absolutely, AND I KEEP SAYING SO, there's no reason to believe it's happening, and yet it's possible. Your inability to comprehend doesn't change the meaning of my statements.

Your persistence in calling it meaningless because it's unfalsifiable with no further context is equivalent to you calling most theoretical physics meaningless. A ton of theories like string theory is by your standard equally unfalsifiable and therefore we shall declare it impossible and stop investigating.

Instead we develop endless hypothetical scenarios specifically so we can look for evidence when new tools for investigating fundamental physics become available.

Found via Wikipedia. From the 70's:

We should perhaps finish our paper with an apology and a caution. We apologize to experimentalists for having no idea what is the mass of the Higgs boson, ..., and for not being sure of its couplings to other particles, except that they are probably all very small. For these reasons, we do not want to encourage big experimental searches for the Higgs boson, but we do feel that people doing experiments vulnerable to the Higgs boson should know how it may turn up.

— John R. Ellis, Mary K. Gaillard, and Dimitri V. Nanopoulos,

One of the problems was that at the time there was almost no clue to the mass of the Higgs boson. Theoretical considerations left open a very wide range somewhere between 10 GeV/c2[13] and 1000 GeV/c2[14] with no real indication where to look.[1]

So you're literally as wrong as you could be. It wasn't until what once was a wild hypothesis had been explored more that they could start to make better predictions around where it might be, decades later, and after tests narrowing down where it wasn't.

I didn't "walk back" either. Exploring multiple possibilities is called hedging, not walking back (since that means you retracted something which I didn't do), and scientists does it too. I didn't say either one option is more likely, I told you there are many possibilities and then you insisted on calling several of them impossible not because any mechanics exclude it's possibility but because you can't see it. That's plainly wrong. You can definitely argue it's improbable, but you don't get to call it impossible without proving it impossible.

Besides the fact that it wasn't actually known if those tests would work, there's also hypothetical tests for simulation theory (eg. testing for pixelated resolution of spacetime, plus endless "consistency tests") so doesn't that make it all the same thing anyway? You're making much too strong assumptions.

You're conflating "possible" with "probable", and refusing to address possibilities you don't have proof of.

When higgs bosons were predicted they were untestable. When gravity waves were predicted they were untestable. When black hole rings were predicted they were untestable.

Then we discovered how to build the sensors and instruments to test them.

You're saying those scientists should've dropped their ideas because at that point it was still impossible to test or falsify.

What scientists do instead is to develop many different alternative theories, then design tests and experiments, and then once data is in then they decide what do believe about the theories based on what the could prove or not.

Edit: why are people like this so aggressively wrong in the dumbest ways... Not only did they pick only one of 3 examples of mine to attack and ignoring the rest, they also did so maximally incorrectly all while failing to understand the consequences of their own policy of rejecting anything you don't know how to test.

The core of my argument is really just "sometimes scientists works on stuff nobody knows how to test, because maybe they'll find out how in the future", and this dude's argument is essentially "if you don't know how to test something it's literally impossible for it to be true and therefore it shall be rejected, but also scientists always knows the path forward and therefore I don't have to reevaluate my understanding of science"

There's an argument that because some of the physical limits we see around entropy density (due to singularities) are proportional to the area of a sphere around the volume, together with math indicating it's possible to translate physics in a 3D volume to a 2D surface, the whole universe might be a projection from the 2D surface of a sphere

You're conflating things. We have no reason to argue those are true with any certainty, but we still can't exclude the possibility. It's the difference of "justified belief" vs coherent theory. Physics have had a ton of theories postulated without evidence where decades later one option was proven true and many others proven false. Under your assumption you shouldn't have made that theory before it could be tested.

I'm not arguing any specific purpose of controlling a simulation in these ways, just that the arguments saying it wouldn't happen are too weak. A multipurpose simulation (imagine one shared by many different teams of simulation researchers) could plausibly be used like this where they mess with just about anything and then reset. Doesn't mean it's likely, just that it's unreasonable to exclude the possibility

If you don't know what they're testing that could certainly seem excessive. But failure of imagination doesn't prove it's impossible, although you can argue it's unlikely

I'm not saying it happens, I'm just saying some of the arguments here aren't logically justified

Simulations of boats in water don't care about what's happening to the water much of the time yet it needs to be there, you seem to be way too confident in your conclusions

You don't rerun everything from scratch. Especially weather simulations can be checkpointed at places you have high certainty, and keep running forks after that point with different parameters. This is extremely common with for example trying to predict wind patterns during forest fires, you simulate multiple branches of possible developments in wind direction, humidity, temperature, etc. If the parameters you test don't cover every scenario that is plausible you might sometimes engineer it into the simulation just to see the worst case scenario, for example.

And in medicine, especially computational biochemistry you modify damn near everything

To the simulated object there's no difference between a fork of a simulation with different parameters vs directly changing parameters in a running simulation.

For one, we’d notice things changing without cause.

Maybe those reactions are part of the test? Or doesn't affect it. Or they abandon instances where it was noticed and the test derailed.