First, particle physics has placed its bet on unification. This is what drives the mathematical ingenuinity that characterizes the field these days. In particular, it simply assumes that unification is the ruling virtue of scientific progress. They are taught this in their graduate education, and (if modestly challenged) they appeal to history. (Indirectly, they may well be influenced by philosophic accounts that privilege unification; one field's textbooks often contains a previous generation's philosophy of science.) But it is not non-trivially true that progress in physics is really best characterized by unification. (Even the so-called Standard Model unifies in only thin sense.) [Note that I am accepting for sake of argument that there is progress, etc.] A role for a historically informed, philosophy of physics could be to ask what would future progress of particle physics look like if we give up on unification as the ruling virtue for, say, more novel or more precise predictions, control over nature, etc. For example, why not place major bets on physics at non fundamental scales?--when I was at Chicago some of the most exciting physicisist were working on the physics of sand, salt, snow, etc. Maybe the breakthroughs of next generations won't be inspired by unification, but by table-top experiments on mid-scale systems.
Second, ne of the major problems with the supercollider, the most important (if not only) source for new empirical data of particle physcis today, is that it has largely become a data-mining exercise. In order to find any 'evidence' in it the scientists have to make non trivial statistical/mathematical and physical assumptions--and discard massive amount of 'data'.) One problem is that it is not clear what it would to say if one has really found/confirmed the existence of Higgs Boson; and what it would mean to say it has not been found. I doubt anybody will admit that the standard model will have been falsified. So, here's another exercise for philosophy of physics--what is the most appropriate methodology in the context of data-mining? In fact, that may be THE fundamental question facing economics and the philosophers that think seriously about it today.
En Passant, in a discussion on the Leiter blog, David Wallace (a prominent philosopher of physics), makes the following important observation: "Perhaps putting aside post-1980 particle physics as a special case, it's pretty uncontroversial that the methodology of physics is effective at achieving physics' goals, and that the results delivered by physics are basically correct (where "correct", for non-realists in philosophy of science, doesn't have to be read as "true"). The sheer extent of the successes of physics in experimental test and in technological application means that physicists can be fairly uncritical about their methodology...[snip] Economics is not remotely in the same position of methodological security as physics; hence, good economists should probably be a lot more conversant with the history of their discipline than good physicists. (If you believe Paul Krugman, failing to be historically informed is a significant part of what's wrong with Chicago-style modern economics.) And post 1980s particle physics is arguably going through a slow-motion methodological crisis precisely because the strong evidential base that used to ground the subject has largely dried up."
Let me leave aside economics until the last sentence of this pece (for, historical ignorance is a widespread sin in the discipline, not exempting Krugman). Wallace is not alone in his claim about particle physics. I heard John Norton express a similar sentiment in conversation about a year ago; as I reported before here, Eric Curiel has published on this, and (as the eminent Dutch philosopher of physics, Fred Muller, reminded me this morning, Lee Smolin wrote a book about it. The sane parts of what follows is indebted to Muller. I offer two observations.