Currently the best known theory of physics at small scales is a quantum field theory known as the Standard Model. "Particles" are phenomena which appear when f

Currently the best known theory of physics at small scales is a quantum field theory known as the Standard Model. "Particles" are phenomena which appear when fields are quantized. They aren't really balls of stuff. E.g. photon is a quantum of a wave in electromagnetic field. These exotic particles are simply a confirmation of predictions made by the Standard Model, they are not surprising, it's just the first time there was enough data to test this particular prediction of the theory. > I'm very skeptical that it's apparently just smaller and smaller particles all of the way down The Standard Model was formulated in 1970s, no principally new phenomena were discovered since. So it's been strong for ~50 years. It's known to be incomplete as it does not explain gravity, and physicists hope that better theories will be found in future. But so far nobody was able to formulate a theory which would make better predictions than the SM. > What if everything here about reality is being misinterpreted? The topic of physics is to build models which predict observed phenomena. Knowing what reality _is_ is a topic of philosophy and religion.