We should perhaps finish our paper with an apology and a caution. We apologize to experimentalists for having no idea what is the mass of the Higgs boson, …, and for not being sure of its couplings to other particles, except that they are probably all very small. For these reasons, we do not want to encourage big experimental searches for the Higgs boson, but we do feel that people doing experiments vulnerable to the Higgs boson should know how it may turn up.
— John R. Ellis, Mary K. Gaillard, and Dimitri V. Nanopoulos,
One of the problems was that at the time there was almost no clue to the mass of the Higgs boson. Theoretical considerations left open a very wide range somewhere between 10 GeV/c2[13] and 1000 GeV/c2[14] with no real indication where to look.[1]
So you’re literally as wrong as you could be. It wasn’t until what once was a wild hypothesis had been explored more that they could start to make better predictions around where it might be, decades later, and after tests narrowing down where it wasn’t.
I didn’t “walk back” either. Exploring multiple possibilities is called hedging, not walking back (since that means you retracted something which I didn’t do), and scientists does it too. I didn’t say either one option is more likely, I told you there are many possibilities and then you insisted on calling several of them impossible not because any mechanics exclude it’s possibility but because you can’t see it. That’s plainly wrong. You can definitely argue it’s improbable, but you don’t get to call it impossible without proving it impossible.