It may be simpler to start our not thinking of particles as matter, but instead thinking of them as little energy fields. Like a magnetic field, a particle has

It may be simpler to start our not thinking of particles as matter, but instead thinking of them as little energy fields. Like a magnetic field, a particle has properties and interacts with some things and not others. This is why it's a "field theory". Say you had ten different light bulbs. Could it make sense to talk about their differing light output as "diameters"? It wouldn't be defined in terms of a physically measured length of the bulbs, rather a diameter could be defined to be about properties of a light bulb. Remember all these words are in some ways arbitrarily chosen by people. If you replaced the word diameter everywhere with "fat content" would all the math still work? The math would still work fine. The problem would be it's even less understandable than diameter, and it makes it less efficient as an abstraction that you can grok and reason about.