these are not really particles per se....it's just that it's easier to think in those terms. they have energy, they vibrate and are influenced by gravity. we call them particles.
I was reading Richard Feynman, who has to be my all-time favorite physicist-,was trying—unsucessfully— to explain just that to his very bright father, with regard to other sub-atomic particles. So help me to betsy, but they are more “spirits” with ectoplasm, than the “billard ball” atoms of the 19th century. Having to think in terms of probabilities than the certainies that newtonian physics once promised.