A narrow structural no-go on corpuscular matter ontology. The Standard Model licenses a fermion inventory classified by lawful quantum labels — spin, charge, flavor, color where applicable, and mass — but does not license the additional classical picture of fermions as tiny hard grains of primitive material stuff. This paper denies the inferential move from lawful labels and localized detection signatures to primitive thinghood. It denies neither fermion reality, nor the predictive machinery of quantum field theory, nor the observed stability of ordinary matter. It denies only the folk-corpuscular ontology in which a fermion is imagined as a minute bead, pellet, or sand-grain-like bit of substance. SR, GR, QM, QFT, and the Standard Model are unchanged. The paper extends to the matter side the same interpretive discipline applied on the photon side of the Timeless Light Model and in the iron-filings no-go: keep the formal object; refuse the unauthorized classical image attached to it.
John Christian William McKinley (Fri,) studied this question.