Particles are emergent properties of fields
And we need to stop teaching "particle physics" and start teaching "fields physics" only.
A favorite question in physics is whether the universe is made of fields or particles.
Although we can detect particles, we see the influences of fields in every day life. For example, electromagnetic fields make objects move, yet the photons of which they are composed are never detected. Instead, they are considered to be “virtual” photons with imaginary amplitudes.
Some people think that quantum mechanics is incomplete and particles are real. Others believe that the wavefunction doesn’t exist at all. Still others believe it is real but collapses every time a measurement is made or a conscious being confronts it.
Quantum mystics believe that consciousness creates reality.
If you are a realist and you take the 100 year old equations for quantum physics seriously, then you are forced to conclude that quantum measurements are a reflection of human experience but does not describe how reality actually works at its most basic level. Rather, human experience is an emergent property of a phenomenon called decoherence. Decoherence occurs when many quantum wavefunctions interact and cancel out until a single probable state results.
Decoherence is similar to thermal equilibrium. If you bring a small number of particles into contact with a large number, those small number will exchange energy with the large number so that they approach the same temperature.
By analogy, my experience of the world is to divide it up into discrete objects, and while there is a physical basis for that, it is not fundamental to reality. Instead, it is an emergent phenomenon from how molecules bond together.
All of this reasoning can be applied to the fields vs. particle debate as well.
In essence, the appearance of particles forms our experience of the universe but the universe is, in fact, a set of fields evolving in time both forward and backward. Particles are an emergent property of the fields that occur when fields decohere.
That means that everything you are made of emerges from fields as part of the process of decoherence.
That doesn’t mean that metaphysically, particles don’t exist. That would be like saying that a state change like ice melting “doesn’t exist” just because it is an emergent property of many water molecules changing their behavior. Rather, it means that what we call particles are not fundamental to our universe. They are a state or process of fields rather than fundamental objects themselves.
The reason why we should care is because modern physics doesn’t really make sense if you learn that particles and measurement are fundamental. They aren’t.
Several books such as Frank Wilczek’s The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces teach quantum physics from a pure fields point of view. That is not to say we cannot talk about “photons” and “electrons” when it makes sense to talk about them. But, when we talk about “high energy particle physics” we should really be saying “high energy field physics”.
Hobson, Art. "There are no particles, there are only fields." American journal of physics 81.3 (2013): 211-223.