>>12875590because scientists genuinely “discover” things. for example in particle physics if you collide particles and something genuinely new is produced and hits your detector with a previously unexplicable signature, then they claim they discovered something new. for physics theorists. they might take some preexisting theory that explains what experimentalist shave found, or some extension of it, and then if they can extract some new prediction of something the experimentalist might find, then they could argue they “discovered” that thing. like the Higgs boson.
for mathematicians it is more about abstract constructions and the properties of these constructions. there is often no way to say if it is important or not. and there is no way to say if it is real in our universe or not without some connection to physics. also. even if they stumble on a formula it is often the case that nobody can know if they were the first to write down that formula. because mathematicians lose track of formulae when they are working on some idea. so claiming to “discover” a formula is a trap. and actually “discovering” something in the physics sense is not what they do
