Felix Flicker at Aeon Magazine:
This remarkable fact raises a tantalising possibility: what if the elementary particles themselves are actually emergent? What if, underlying what we think of as reality, there is some set of atom-like things from which the proton, electron and so on emerge? A clear statement to this effect was made by Grigory Volovik in The Universe in a Helium Droplet (2003). To paraphrase his thesis: if we shrunk to the size of a few atoms and went for a swim in a cold quantum fluid, such as liquid helium, we would encounter a variety of emergent particles that would seem to us just as real and fundamental as the supposedly elementary particles do to us now. So what is to say that we do not already exist in such a fluid? As Volovik observes, some of the biggest unsolved problems in physics would be instantly and satisfactorily solved.
Others such as Xiao-Gang Wen and collaborators have introduced similar ideas, noting that such approaches seek a more fundamental description of reality than better-known ideas such as string theory. For example, string theory has to postulate the broad classes of particle such as ‘fermion’; but if reality is underpinned by a quantum fluid, these classes themselves can emerge naturally.
more here.
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