[dnautics]

> plenty of eventually-proven math conjectures

As a theoretical math major and a practicing scientist, I'm just going to have to say that these are not comparable, neither in process, nor ontologically.

> conceivable

that's a very weak way of saying the scaling factor of collision energies was known, and the technology to build the required machine right around the corner (we could have found the higgs with technology proposed for the hole in texas, only 20-or-so years after the prediction of the higgs; at the time higgs was postulated superconductors were already known for 10 years and the first superconducting NMR was 10 years away).

Anyways, my point is that there is a categorical difference. At the time of its postulation, building an experiment that could say yay or nay about the existence of the higgs was largely an engineering problem.