Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Readers may recall that I've been writing of late about Deborah Mayo, a professor at Virginia Tech.  To restate, Mayo has written Statistical Inference as Severe Testing ; a book discussing statistics, induction, and the philosophy of science. Much of the book is obscure to me, though I skim through what I have to in order to get to stuff where I can gain something. To move forward nonetheless: near the middle of the book she has a discussion of the Higgs boson. Allow me to talk about that today.  Back in 1964 Peter Higgs predicted the eventual discovery of a certain particle that would be responsible for other particles having mass. This became known as the "Higgs boson" or, more grandly as the "God particle"! Over the following decades the Higgs boson came to be regarded as an important piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, and the fact that no one had experimentally confirmed its existence became something of a scandal.  Then came 2012, and CERN, ...

The very existence of neutrinos is something that admirers of The Big Bang Theory (the television show, not the actual theory) might think of in terms of a conversation between Leonard and Sheldon.  The theoretical physicists (Sheldon Cooper's real-world colleagues) have been saying they exist for a long time now. Since a paper in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli.  But the experimentalists (Leonard Hofstadter's tribe) have never been able to find one of the little buggers.  Now, it seems they have. Leonard has reported this and Sheldon has said "I told you so."  Heck, the Japanese built a huge facility specifically devoted to the detection of neutrinos, called the Super Kamiokande. In essence, it is a big tank of water with a lot of photomultiplier tubes in it. The tubes allow the physicists to watch for the predicted "Cherenkov radiation." Whatever that is supposed to be. It didn't help. Now, the credit for the key experimental observation goes to the Large Hadr...