What are "particles"? First, see a couple of minutes of this video. It is just graphics, no one talks.

Think of it as zooming in on the Universe, first at the largest cosmological scale of the entire Big Bang, and then zooming into the quantum atomic level.

What if the re-occurring structures and patterns you see, like the Mandelbrot "bug" looking design, were actual material structures, like galaxies, planets, then apples, then molecules, then atoms, and so on. The way the Universe actually clumped together might look differently. For instance, this Mandelbrot fractal is probably not the way the Universe actually works, but it sure looks like nature obeys fractal laws.