>>12588287This is a hard question to answer and really depends on your background and intuition for math. The "I'm confident in high school math and physics" explanation could be this: Particles are the quantized excited states of a field. A classical field is something like an electric, magnetic, or gravitational field: something that has a value at every point in space. Kind of like how a guitar string has many discrete harmonics, a field has discrete energy levels, which correspond to different particle numbers with different energies. All these fields, which suffuse all of space, have rules that govern how they interact with themselves and each other, giving rise to what we see as forces, motion, structure, and so on.
>>12588518I mean I personally don't think 17 is that big of a number of particles to describe the entirety of existence and all its laws. And by far the trend in particle physics has been to *reduce*, not increase, the number of free parameters or the number of what are considered fundamental particles. That's the goal of pretty much all physics research since the 1950s and 60s. When you look at these new theories that posit the existence of new particles, they're generally a mechanism that allows you to reconsider several existing particles as emergent phenomena and no longer fundamental, so you are actually simplifying the fundamental physical rules describing the system.
