What is a particle?
A particle is a knot in the way neighboring patches of the world translate each other's readings, a twist that no local repair can undo. Where everything has settled, following the translations around any closed loop brings you back where you started. Around a particle it does not, and the loop carries a twist. No single seam holds that twist, so fixing seams one at a time only moves it along, like a wrinkle pushed across a carpet. The part of the twist that turns a patch's internal labels is the particle's charge, and the part that turns directions in space is its spin. The repair work spent at every tick holding the knot in place is its mass. Bring a knot together with its mirror twist and both come undone, which is annihilation.
Also in Chapter 35: What Is Anything Made Of?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 28: What Is a Particle, What Is a Wave, and Why Does It Look Like Both?watch a universe make its own particles