These aren't really "discoveries". These particles were already known to exist (or, to be precise, whose existence was predicted by the Standard Model, just like the Higgs boson). This is just the first time they have actually been observed. The headline is misleading, but the first sentence in the article gets it right:
"The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles."
> These aren't really "discoveries". These particles were already known to exist (or, to be precise, whose existence was predicted by the Standard Model, just like the Higgs boson). This is just the first time they have actually been observed.
But doesn't that make it a discovery? Sure, a discovery of something already predicted by the Standard Model, but unless it has been observed, we just don't know for sure if it actually exists.
The Standard Model just has been very successful at predicting stuff :)
To my way of thinking one of the defining characteristics of a discovery is that it is unexpected, so a confirmation of a theoretical prediction doesn't count.
I think I would be very happy to be the first person to observe a new particle, its discovery enough for me :) It does not need to appent all of known physics or be unexpected for us to call it a discovery
I get what you're saying, but it's not like someone looked through a microscope and actually saw one of these things for the first time. It's computers crunching trillions of data points and spitting out a result. So it's not clear who "the first person to observe this" actually was.
"The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles."