[whyever]

These tables are editorialized by the Particle Data Group, they summarize and distill the empirical evidence of thousands of high-energy physics experiments. Not every experiment is replicated, but some are, hence the different ratings of how sure the editors are the particles exist.

From their website:

"In the 2014 Review, the listings include 3,283 new measurements from 899 papers, in addition to 32,000 measurements from 9,000 papers that appeared in earlier editions. Evaluations of these properties are abstracted in summary tables."

http://pdg.lbl.gov/2016/html/what_is_pdg.html

[lngnmn]

> probability, statistics, accelerators and detectors

Surely, there could not be any error here. Nothing socially constructed.

Isn't it already borders nonsense that in the universe which is sustained by a couple of fundamental conservation laws there supposed to be hundreds of elementary (presumably fundamental) particles which emerge and disintegrate in time, which is not even an intrinsic property of "more real" things like photons.

[whyever]

> Surely, there could not be any error here. Nothing socially constructed.

There could be. Physicists have been trying very hard for the last 40 years to find something the standard model cannot explain, without success. Some experimentalists are actually disappointed about this.

> Isn't it already borders nonsense that in the universe which is sustained by a couple of fundamental conservation laws there supposed to be hundreds of elementary (presumably fundamental) particles which emerge and disintegrate in time, which is not even an intrinsic property of "more real" things like photons.

You are confused. The standard model has 17 elementary particles (+ anti particles). There are a lot of composite particles, like the ones the article talks about. Not sure what you mean about decays, but photons are a special case, because they move at the speed of light. Other elementary particles, like the heavier quarks, can and do decay.