Are Particles Self-Organized Systems?
Where did elementary particles come from? What mechanisms are responsible for their occurrence and maintenance? Are they compound or truly elementary? Is vacuum primordial soup where elementary particles are born? Are quantum behavior and relativistic phenomena fundamental or emergent? This paper describes a primitive active medium far from thermodynamic equilibrium, which we associate with vacuum and in which a system of particles and fields arises, similar to that described by the standard model. Phenomena usually attributed to quantum or relativistic media emerge during vacuum self-organization. These include discrete spectra of ground states, charges, oscillation periods, and link flavors, spatial phase coherency, virtual states, tunneling, entanglement, time-related uncertainty of states, and coexistent Planck-like and Einstein-like time scales. The form of vacuum self-organization is a coherent time-crystal network. Here, different fields arise as quantum states of the same gravitation-antigravitation field. Particle-like entities emerge as topological defects. The analysis was accompanied by numerical estimates of several physical constants, the values of which had never previously been derived from theory. These results are consistent with the experimental data.