I mostly agree with Bloodshadow here, except for the point that even if given an infinite amount of time, I'm not sure science would discover everything. That said...
ratcharmer, I'm not quite sure what you were getting at with the guy explaining the bullet in court. Can you explain the intent of the metaphor a bit more?
As for the six dimensional particle: I'm curious what you think the scientific method entails. You seem to be saying that it is a strict set of well defined rules that cannot be broken. The bare bones scientific method is just:
Hypothesis/Prediction -> Experiment/Observe -> Analyze/Report -> Rinse/Repeat
Who says luck or intuition can't enter into this? Why do you think it's so rigid?
However, I must remain unconvinced that it is possible to solve for all variables. Think about it; there are literally infinite ways one could put together a mathematically defined universe, and only in a vanishingly small fraction of these would it be possible to discover/solve for all of the variables in that universe using mathematics, logic, and the scientific method.
You are right to be unconvinced, because mathematicians, logicians, and scientists certainly are. There was a time it was believed that if we knew all variables, we could simply "plug and chug" our way to all the answers, but this ended at the start of the 20th century when classical Newtonian physics was overturned. The universe was not as deterministic as we thought, and things aren't so neat and pretty.
In math, most models of the natural world are non-linear differential equations, about 95% of which cannot be solved. In logic, Godel found in the 1920s that no logical language of any useful complexity can ever be totally consistent and complete (i.e., it must either contain a true sentence that it cannot prove, or a contradiction). Therefore, math cannot be reduced to a base of formal logic, instead it's an "art" without rigid rules. In science, even IF would could account for EVERY variable, we could not measure them accurately enough (to infinite decimal places) to ward off chaos.
In short, pretty much every scientist on the planet will agree with you, since what you stated is not the goal of science.
The problem is that science alone can never make this jump. The system with the hyperparticle is set up such that the phenomena will invariably be dismissed as experimental error, and unless you already knew to look for it, or it also affected some other physical process in some predictable way, it would never be noted by a standard scientific approach.
Again, look at chaos theory. Newtonian thought had a vice-like grip on the scientific world for hundreds of years. In the 1890s, Poincare first discovered what we would now call chaos. And what happened? He largely ignored it (although he did write a description of the butterfly effect some 20 years later). No one could grasp the gravity of what he had discovered, and the problem was ignored (because it was part of a question that everyone assumed Newtonian physics answered).
Some 70 years later, Lorenz proves the existence of chaos, and 20 years after that it was accepted into mainstream science. After that, several researchers--particularly those dealing with electrical signals--realized they had been seeing chaos for decades, but no one had the right mindset to understand what they were witnessing. They couldn't
see what they saw, and disregarded it as simple "noise" in their signals.
Disregarding something they didn't understand is exactly what you say people will do with the six dimensional particle, and yet chaos theory exists today in spite of it. I'm guessing you're familiar with Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions? We will persist in one mindset until another is absolutely undeniable, and the transition is abrupt (unless you're on the fringe). You don't understand how we would find the six dimensional particle because our mindset is not equipped for it. But there's no way to know today how we will perceive the future, just as a few decades ago almost no one could perceive chaos as we do today.
I could easily design a machine that would detect the hyperparticle using technology available today. The problem is that such a machine would need to cover a very large area, have a very low error rate, and be sensitive enough to detect even modest abnormalities. All this adds together to mean that detecting the hypothetical hyperparticle would be incredibly expensive, and no one could gather supporting evidence that would be considered scientifically credible.
Ignoring the fact that CERN's incredibly expensive LHC is designed in part to test for higher dimensions that may lead to finding your [admittedly hypothetical] particle, I think you're losing perspective on history. We're on the precipice of the unknown, but history is full of examples where claims exactly like yours could have been made.
Leonardo da Vinci conceived of helicopters and airplanes, yet it was probably costly and dangerous to build them. So do you think da Vinci had any concept of the cost or technology in a Boeing 747? And yet they exist a mere 450 years after he lived, even though in his time someone may have said something similar to what you're saying now about the particle.
