The Higgs was not guaranteed to be there, and its absence would have been obvious and discoverable. If they'd seen no signal by now everyone would likely be co

The Higgs was not guaranteed to be there, and its absence would have been obvious and discoverable. If they'd seen no signal by now everyone would likely be comfortable saying that there was no standard model Higgs. However, SOMETHING needs to break electroweak symmetry---this is known because the W and Z gauge bosons are massive, and it isn't possible to formulate a consistent gauge theory with massive bosons without symmetry breaking. Whether it was the Higgs mechanism, or some technicolor (strongly-coupled, QCD-like) theory, or something else entirely was not well constrained before the machine turned on. With that in mind, it's clear that it might be that what they found is not just a standard model Higgs, but one of a number of higher-energy excitations. If that's true then the Standard Model is not, strictly speaking, correct, though it can be thought of as an effective field theory ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_field_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_field_theory ).