As the article explains, counting is very hard.
IMHO, I like to count the x3 colors of quarks and the x2 chirality of bosons. So I get 16*3 fermions and 1+8?+3?+1 bosons, in total 61 but the number of bosons is not a hill I will do die on.
On the other extreme, there are some proposal to reduce the number of particles, in particular it makes a lot of sense to consider the electron and neutrino as a single class of particle, and the up and down quark as a single class of particle, so I guess the number goes down to 6 fermions + 4 bosons = 10? in total (I'd keep chirality, so perhaps 12+4=16?).
And there are even more extreme proposals to consider quarks and leptons in a single bag of mud. In particular this was popular like twenty years ago, but the experiments disagree (IIRC by a small amount, IIRC it's not a very bad approximation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi%E2%80%93Glashow_model I tried to count the particles there and I gave up, let's say a lot.
And you still have to add gravitons (and their weird cousin particles) and perhaps more than one Higgs bosons. So the number should increase in the future.
And there are still ideas to add a global x2, because it would be nice if every bososn has an undiscovered fermion companion and vice versa. IIRC it's falling out of fashion because the simple versions don't agree with the experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry but it sounds interesting :(
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In conclusion: Don't get too attached to the number 17.
Very interesting. I imagine though that the 17 model is reasonably consistent. I wonder what parallels there are with other areas of mathematics.
Something like "17 different values of mass"[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] is a good simple model, if you allow me to put enough footnotes at the end. Different particles have different mass, and we can use the mass to classify them and call it a day and so we get 17.
[1] Actually the photons and the gluons have mass=0, but nobody would confuse them. So, let's count them as different particles. (If it exist, the graviton also has mass=0 too.)
[2] There is something weird with the W and Z particles, Hardcore particle physicist may claim they are the same particle and give a two hour talk about the apparent difference of mass.
[3] There is something weird with the mass of neutrinos. Don't ask unless you really love linear algebra.
[4] There may be details that I'm hiding on purpouse.
[5] There are details that I forgot. I studied this a long time ago.
[6] There are details that I never learned, perhaps more than what I expect.
[7] Unknown unknowns.