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The Rise and Fall of Supersymmetry
Ethan Siegel at the StartsWithABang blog writes:
"Have you ever wondered why the masses of the fundamental particles have the small values that they do, compared to, say, the Planck scale? Whether the fundamental forces all unify at some high energy? And whether there's a natural, compelling particle candidate for dark matter? Well, in theory supersymmetry (or SUSY, for short) could have solve all three of these problems. In fact, if it solves the first one alone, there will be definitive experimental signatures for it at the Large Hadron Collider. Well, the LHC has completed its first run, and found nothing. What does this mean for theoretical physics, for SUSY in particular, and what are the implications for string theory? A very clear explanation is given here; it might be time to start hammering in those coffin nails."
Just because it's ridiculously hard to prove doesn't mean that it's false. For example, most physists believe gravity needs a force carrier which they've called a "graviton", the same way light (electromagnetic radiation) consists of photons. That theory is 80 years old and still totally unproven but as long as nobody has a good competing theory we still kind of assume that's how it works.
Gravity waves have already been proven to exist. The 1993 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the study of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar that showed indirect confirmation of the existence of gravity waves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H....
Not that we're not trying to look for gravitational waves and other clues, but most of it is so far off the scale of what we can experimentally detect that it'll probably still be unproven in a thousand years.
Gravity wave detection is expected within the next 20 years from the LIGO programme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G..., http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... It won't require a thousand years, nor is it beyond existing technology. LIGO is already taking measurements in the US, at Hanford and Livingston, and advanced LIGO will increase the sensitivity of the LIGO interferometers by a an order of magnitude, and is expected to increase detection rates from a few per year to 100s per year by increasing the detection volume a thousand fold. If advanced LIGO doesn't detect anything, then it will be time to review the theory.
(I worked for ~6 years at the University of Western Australia in the physics department in collaboration with the Australian LIGO research group)