Quora answer: What does it feel like when you realize that a scientific theory you had complete faith in is proved wrong?
According to Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery all you can do with a theory is prove it wrong. And that has been widely accepted now, so that is why scientists are so happy when their theories are proved wrong because that is itself something that can be known and it thus limits the possibilities of how nature works and how it was “designed”. It is not so much by Intelligent Design, but by Design Intelligence that we come to know the way nature actually works as opposed to how some people would like it to work, i.e. simplistically. Nature is complicated and even complex. Right now we are on the verge of a disproof of a high magnitude, if the Higgs particle is not found soon, and if there is no super-symmetry, and neutrinos really do go faster than the speed of light. We are not there yet, but this would be some big disproofs of well accepted parts of the standard model. And we will have to go back to the drawing board, no matter how elegant those theories are. If they are not true of nature, then we will start from scratch and try to find something better. And we will feel good about it because our theory was disproved, and so that takes us at least one step closer to knowing something more useful about the structure of nature.