To find disagreement with the particle concept in what Harry Cliff is telling us, we don't have to go back to the ancient, or the Newtonian, or any older theory than that of PAM Dirac as explained in his "Principles of Quantum Mechanics".  The waves he offered us are waves of probability,  the probability of locating a particle here or there.   In terms of the experimental situation where many particles in a system share the same state,  it is the distribution in space of such particles.  The point is that, Dirac, as I understand him, maintains the idea of a physical particle but describes its dynamic variables, position, momentum, etc. by means of a probability function, a wave function, as did Erwin Schrodinger, but from a mathematical model rather than from an ad hoc equation. <br><br>But Cliff is saying something very different, at least as I understand him.   He said, as I understand, that the pervasive reality is the particle field which produces the particle if there is enough energy available to make the field "ripple".   An interesting reversal, because in classical and also in quantum physics, as I learned physics, we tended to talk about the particle producing the field, i.e. the field OF the election.    With Cliff, it is the electron OF the field. <br><br>I do not understand enough contemporary physics to go further than this, but perhaps someone with greater knowledge could continue this comparison.,(reply>), @Maciej Gancarz Jr. As a physicist of mid 20th century instruction, I would point to particle pair creation as within the imagination of Richard Feynman.   I am not sure if he conceived of that beyond the case of virtual pairs, but the math was there.  I am not doubting that the basic theory is one of fields with particles a peculiarity of the field.   In any case, I understand your reply better now.  Thanks!,(reply>), @Goedelite Kurt it is. Hawking Radiation, for example, could only exist from a particle-antiparticle birth at the event horizon. An already existing particle could not escape. The question then presents itself: from where did this particle arise? Of course, this is not an confirmed phenomena, but the math is there. I'm not going to argue against Dirac, but I'm pointing out that modern theoretical physics is headed in the direction that fields give rise to particles which still seen to have one foot in the door of being able to alter those fields.,(reply>), @element4element4 Your reply is appreciated, but I have not confused the wave function with the field as understood, I believe, by physicists today.  In fact,  I distinguished between the two.   I also emphasized the different roles played by particles and fields in classical and Dirac's quantum electrodynamics and those of contemporary physics, as I understand it.  The earlier view usually speaks of the field as produced by or accompanying the particle, whereas today the particle is a linguistic metaphor for an anomaly of the field, a metaphorical "ripple".   No classical physicist would have been so odd or ingenious as to describe a particle as a field peculiarity, probably because we experience it on a macro level in the impacts of a raindrop or a dust spec in the eye. <br><br>On the other hand,  a field without any "ripples" at all seems to me a curiosity, because I am used to the idea that a field must have sources.  One could posit a uniform field as one whose sources are at infinity, I suppose.   I cannot speculate more, because I am largely ignorant of physics today and too old easily to catch up.   Thanks for your reply.,(reply>), @Maciej Gancarz Jr. Your reply does  not seem relevant to my critique.,(reply>), I think you are confusing two different concepts, the wavefunction and the field are two different things. Let's start classically, a particle is something that has a finite number of degrees of freedom like a point particle. Its degrees of freedom can be its position, momentum, maybe angular momentum (if it has internal structure) etc. A (classical) field is something that has infinite number of degrees of freedom, like a guitar string, a membrane (like a drum) or even the electromagnetic or gravitational field.<br><br>For a quantum description we have a  wavefunction which is a form of probability distribution (amplitude to be precise) over all the degrees of freedom in your system (essentially telling you which quantum state you are in). Whether you have a particle or a field, quantum mechanically you associate a wavefunction to these.<br><br>Dirac in his book was talking about the particle-wave duality and thus talking about the wavefunction (while assuming that classically the object is a particle). Cliff was talking about a more fundamental description where the degrees of freedom are fields, these are not the wavefunction. In quantum physics it turns out that if you want to describe a system of many particles, it can naturally be described as a system with a single field. It naturally encodes many non-trivial many-body aspects of the particles and even explains the principle of quantum indistinguishability. The particles are then ripples of the field. Whether the particles or the fields are fundamental in this description is a longer discussion. Most physicists nowadays consider the fields to be the fundamental objects, while people like Weinberg probably have a different point of view.