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First Particle Comprising Four Quarks Discovered
ananyo writes "Physicists have resurrected a particle that may have existed in the first hot moments after the Big Bang. Arcanely called Zc(3900), it is the first confirmed particle made of four quarks, the building blocks of much of the Universe's matter (abstract one, abstract two). Until now, observed particles made of quarks have contained only three quarks (such as protons and neutrons) or two quarks (such as the pions and kaons found in cosmic rays)."
I don't think anyone likes the Standard Model, it's inelegant and has more "elementary" particles than can be easily memorized, but it keeps making accurate predictions.
Actually that is not really true: just about anyone can do a very simple experiment which is inconsistent with the predictions of the Standard Model. Pick up an object and then let it go. There is nothing in the Standard Model which will predict the behaviour you observe. That's why we physicists don't like it. Parts of it are extremely elegant - e.g. the Higgs mechanism - but since it can't explain gravity we know it is wrong and yet we still cannot find any better model that works for all the other fundamental forces and gravity...not to mention explaining other phenomena like Dark Matter, matter/anti-matter asymmetry of the universe, baryon number violation... etc. The number of particles and free parameters is a minor issue!