Abstract

It is a well-known historical fact that the discovery of a new kind of object is not easily accepted or recognized by scientific communities. This is very often the case when the existence of such kind of object had not been predicted by any theory. In this paper I intend to analyze the reasons why this type of discovery is so difficult to recognize. I argue that the discovery of a new, unpredicted kind of object always constitutes an anomaly for the accepted theories about a given domain of phenomena. In order to assimilate the discovery, such theories must be revised and sometimes drastically modified. As a result of this process, the taxonomy of the entities belonging to the domain of a given theory may undergo deep changes. In last resort, what explains the reluctance of scientific communities to recognize the discovery of a new kind of object is the fact that theories may not be easy to modify. I provide examples of those situations taken from the field of contemporary particle physics