Mmm, scientific click bait titling. More accurate would be "Physicists demonstrate a theoretical subatomic structure in simulation". That's important, to be sure, but it has nothing to do with demonstrating the existence of a particle - we've determined something "should" exist based on simulation and data-interpretation plenty of times, and many of those have ended up being wrong. And that's good: good science comes from discovering what _isn't_ true, but that makes it all the more silly to have this title on the article. We've got the simulation worked out... now we need to see if it holds up to reality. It might not. If so, that's valuable information.
"On their own, neutrons are very unstable and will convert into protons — positively charged subatomic particles — after ten minutes. "
...
"For the tetraneutron, this lifetime is only 5×10^(-22) seconds (a tiny fraction of a billionth of a nanosecond). "<p>10 minutes is an eternity and 5×10^(-22) seconds is closer to what I'd consider 'very unstable'
Physics is one science where the seemingly impossible winds up being possible all the time. Strange to think people spend a good portion of their lives studying things thought to not exist.
We've updated the link from <a href="http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/7339.html" rel="nofollow">http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/7339.html</a> to this, which looks like the original source.
I read the headline as "demand" and thought this was a rather petulant reaction to the "no new physics" development this year.<p><a href="https://home.cern/about/updates/2016/05/theory-theoretical-physics-crisis" rel="nofollow">https://home.cern/about/updates/2016/05/theory-theoretical-p...</a>
The original paper [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.05631" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.05631</a>
I don't know, maybe this discovery has scientific value. But could it be the sometimes scientists report small "breakthroughs" just so that they keep the funding coming ?