ABSTRACT
Prior to the start of data collection at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, many in the high energy physics community strongly expected that evidence for supersymmetry (SUSY) would be observed at the LHC. To date, these expectations have not been realised. This chapter explores the experimental attempts to find evidence for “ugly” results and “unconceived alternatives” (Stanford 2006) and focuses on one such example: the attempts to measure the self-coupling of the Higgs boson. Stanford (2019) has argued that, due to conservative attitudes, today's scientific communities are ‘less effective’ than their predecessors ‘in developing fundamentally novel theoretical conceptions of nature in the first place’ (p. 3931). This chapter examines the transformation in epistemic strategies following the lack of experimental evidence for SUSY at the Large Hadron Collider, including attempts to find evidence for disconfirming and “ugly” experimental results that could provide fundamentally novel concepts, and shows how ugliness can be a way to exceed imagination as a pathway to something unconceived.
