I assume these particles were already predicted as part of the Standard Model?
One, to verify the Model (after all, if its predictions fail in some part it will have to be revised).
Another, to verify the characteristics of the predicted particles (there might be some differences from the prediction that are important, but not hypothesis-breaking).
Finally, however unlikely and yet most excitingly (to me at least), to open new avenues of questioning and hypothesis up by really throwing into question some things.
http://pdg.lbl.gov/2016/tables/rpp2016-qtab-mesons.pdf http://pdg.lbl.gov/2016/tables/rpp2016-qtab-baryons.pdf
Here are two independent examples that agree in their results: experimental measurements at the LHC; theoretical predictions from QFT.
There has been times when Hegelian "logic" has been accepted, published by Oxford University press, peer-reviewed, highly praised and successfully taught to students. I have read parts of Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. I have read it after The Principles of Mathematics and things like Haskell Prelude.
I have read peer-reviewed commentaries to The Highest Yoga Tantra and such crap like commentaries to Hatha Yoga Pradipika by some Australian lady with some funny Hindu nickname.
I have read even beautiful sufi texts in which they freely mix and match anthropomorphic qualities to produce a beautiful carpet of linguistic patterns which describe nothing that exist. Peer-reviewed and highly praised, of course.
Socially constructed nonsense is not something rare and uncommon. To the contrary, most of publicly available information is bullshit, or at least highly inaccurate, full of meaningless generalizations, flawed logic and amounts to nothing but mere compilation of current memes.
So, I am more or less familiar with how such things could emerge. My question is - what is a single falsifiable experiment which proves that this is not socially constructed, highly sophisticated sectarian set of beliefs supported by complex (but meaningless) simulations (instead of mere a book of dogma).
There is plenty of stuff in science that is imperfect and deeply flawed. Look at all the poorly reproduced studies on various nutrition and health products, for example. The Standard model is not part of that weak set.
The way to oppose social construction is increased rigor and experimentation. The Standard Model has some of the highest rigor and largest amount of experiments backing it.
Can you describe how such an experiment might be constructed?
From their website:
"In the 2014 Review, the listings include 3,283 new measurements from 899 papers, in addition to 32,000 measurements from 9,000 papers that appeared in earlier editions. Evaluations of these properties are abstracted in summary tables."
Surely, there could not be any error here. Nothing socially constructed.
Isn't it already borders nonsense that in the universe which is sustained by a couple of fundamental conservation laws there supposed to be hundreds of elementary (presumably fundamental) particles which emerge and disintegrate in time, which is not even an intrinsic property of "more real" things like photons.
There could be. Physicists have been trying very hard for the last 40 years to find something the standard model cannot explain, without success. Some experimentalists are actually disappointed about this.
> Isn't it already borders nonsense that in the universe which is sustained by a couple of fundamental conservation laws there supposed to be hundreds of elementary (presumably fundamental) particles which emerge and disintegrate in time, which is not even an intrinsic property of "more real" things like photons.
You are confused. The standard model has 17 elementary particles (+ anti particles). There are a lot of composite particles, like the ones the article talks about. Not sure what you mean about decays, but photons are a special case, because they move at the speed of light. Other elementary particles, like the heavier quarks, can and do decay.
So I would assume that yes they have been predicted and is opening the doors for further confirmations?
If the particles were already predicted by the standard model, what kind of unsolved questions are to address here, besides validating the predictions of the standard model even further? (serious question)
"prediction" != "assumption" != "theory" "observation" != "proof"
You start with a hypothesis with no assumption of truth. Using that hypothesis you make a prediction and then use observation to test your prediction. During your observation you may find proof that your prediction was correct, which in turn provides support for your hypothesis. Once sufficient evidence is found for a hypothesis, it becomes a theory.
Also, the distinction between assumption and hypothesis is subjective, it depends what aspect of the phenomenon you care about at that time. Another term for assumption could be "auxiliary hypothesis".
Proof refers to the set of logical deductions (from theory + assumptions) that lead to the model, it has nothing to do with the observations.
It's always hypothesis then theory. Your hypothesis may be based on other theories, but it is itself not a theory.
From Wikipedia: "The scientific method involves the proposal and testing of hypotheses, by deriving predictions from the hypotheses about the results of future experiments, then performing those experiments to see whether the predictions are valid. This provides evidence either for or against the hypothesis. When enough experimental results have been gathered in a particular area of inquiry, scientists may propose an explanatory framework that accounts for as many of these as possible. This explanation is also tested, and if it fulfills the necessary criteria (see above), then the explanation becomes a theory. This can take many years, as it can be difficult or complicated to gather sufficient evidence."
However it is computationally infeasible to calculate them directly, without using various approximations. Physicists try to solve these problems numerically (see for example about the field called lattice QCD), but it is not always possible and leads to introducing various approximations that produce errors and other artifacts in the numerical predictions.
So the particles were allowed by the standard model, but we didn't know for sure their properties. So this provides way to verify already done numerical predictions (I don't really know were they be done for this exact particles or not) and give us data about exact properties of these particles.
One could possibly draw an analogy with (quantum) chemistry here.
It's difficult to find an easy example. After some searches in Google I found this unrelated example: http://www.strings.ph.qmul.ac.uk/~bigdraw/feynman/slide3.htm...
It has 9 Feynman diagrams. If you look at the top left diagram, there is an electron that enters from the bottom right corner, then it emits a photon that go out thought the top left corner, then the electron goes out through the top left corner.
The following two diagrams show the case were the electron emits a second (and third) photon and reabsorbs it, so the second (and third) photons are not visible for the experimenter, they are virtual photons. These additional photons are only important because the change slight the properties of the electron.
In the next three diagrams the photon is so strong that it can spontaneously split in another electron and a positron. It looks like a loop/circle, because positrons are like electrons traveling backward in time. They are virtual electrons, and again they are not visible in the lab, they are only important to make a tiny correction to the result of the experiment.
The other three diagrams have two virtual electrons, than makes even smaller corrections.
And in addition of the virtual electrons, there can be virtual muons and tauons. They are like electrons but with more mass. So the probability of having one of them is smaller, so the correction is smaller. In this case, I think that the correction is so small that it's impossible to measure it.
And you can have another virtual particles, like virtual quarks and virtual W, anything that has a charge. Moreover you can have virtual unknown particles (with charge) because nature doesn't care if we know the particle yet or not. But they are heavier, so the correction is negligible.
If you change the experiment, and for example make a electron collide with a positron, then the calculations are very similar, but there is more energy laying around, and the corrections from heavy particles are more important, so this variation is more useful to discover new particles.
Back to your question ...
The new particles are composed by three quarks, but actually they are composed by a lot of gluons and virtual quarks and antiquarks. To do any calculations you have to include a lot of diagrams like in the figure linked above, and a lot more, many many more.
IIRC the calculation is so complex that it's not possible to compare the experimental results with theoretical calculations. Perhaps they have some heuristic to compare the results with the results of similar particles.
This was probably part of a bigger experiment that produces a lot of particles, and they are trying to classify them in families. And perhaps in the classifications they can spot some strange pattern that may provide a hit that there is a new elementary particle.
Professor Tim Gershon, Professor of Physics at University of Warwick and UK spokesperson for the LHCb experiment, explained what will come next for the LHCb experiment: “After the LHCb experiment is upgraded in the next long shutdown of the LHC (during 2019-20), it will be able to move to the next stage in the search for new particles: namely, doubly heavy baryons.
See e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.4806
The problem is that it is hard for us to predict masses/energies of new composite particles because although Standard Model provides hypothetical way to do it, it is infeasible computationally.
[1] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/64862/resonances-...
But if there are thousands of different such "surprising-to find-particles" to possibly detect, is it actually surprising to observe one of them?
Edit:
Also, from the top answer at your link: "The first generation of elementary particles are by observation not composite and therefore not seen to decay...The Standard Model of elementary particles, with the three generations of matter, gauge bosons in the fourth column and the Higgs boson in the fifth."
From wikipedia: "In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson with no spin, electric charge, or colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
So do elementary particles decay or not?
It is hard to correctly identify what exactly particles from those possible thousands are observed in given data. The are two main problems: the properties of those not yet observed particles are not well known (because it is computationally hard to predict them from the standard model) and because the number of useful events is much much smaller than the number of events that correspond to already known events.
> So do elementary particles decay or not?
I don't see a contradiction here: the first generation of elementary particles does not decay (or has not been observed to decay yet), Higgs boson is not from then because the author of the answer are talking about the first generation of fermions and Higgs boson is not one of them.