[glenstein]

>Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing.

Well you would have needed the LHC to confirm that, too, right? As a totally uneducated person just remembering media and online discussion about it at the time, I think the most interesting possibility was the detection of entirely new particles, which didn't happen.

And in the run-up to the LHC, I think there was a lot of hope in the possibility of finding stuff, but maybe there's not as much hope now.

[morbia]

Well that's sort of my point. In the media there was a lot of excitement about detecting supersymmetry with a whole array of new particles. When talking to the general public, it's easy to drum up the excitement by saying we're going to find lots of stuff. On the other hand, wheeling out a Physicist in front of the public and say "Finding nothing would be the most exciting outcome!" is a much harder sell, even though it is arguably true.

Which is the most exciting outcome between SUSY and absolutely nothing is very much debatable. However, I really can't stress how big an outcome it would have been if we didn't detect the Higgs. Generating a mass term for the W and Z bosons which is gauge invariant is hard. Without the Higgs mechanism, all the gauge bosons should be massless and yet the W and Z are very heavy. It wouldn't just be the case of the model doesn't work in some cases (massive neutrinos, dark matter candidate etc), you might as well throw the whole thing in the bin.

Edit: Typo