OK, I have some kind of intent sorted out.
While my short-term goal is a flying car, since Popular Mechanics can't deliver, it is up to me!
ZPE is the ground-state, particles like electrons, protons and neutrons are the fundamental particles.
The short-live particles are 'splinters', not enough/too much energy to land on an island of stability.
Electrons are like a bubble on the surface of water.  Protons/neutrons more like Leidenfrost droplets, dancing on the surface, while causing little depressions.  We call big collections of these depressions gravity, BTW.
Photons are over-achieving electrons, heads all spinning [wavelength] while they dance on their own wake-field.
BTW, that Michelson/Morely experiment?
Could never had detected motion, here is why.
As light interacts with a mirror, the reflected beam HAS to be going the speed of light, relative to the surface of the mirror.  Likewise, light passing through a lens or 1/4 wave plate would of course emerge from that glass that V of C.  Any time light touches anything, that interaction occurs at the same rate.
The velocity of light is simply the exchange rate of energy between matter and photons.
This is why interferometers cannot detect motion, only acceleration.
Lorentz and his famous contraction were based on Maxwell/Heaviside, others.  But Maxwell is an approximation, missing terms that simple experiments can show to be real.
Amperes equations easily predict phenomena that Maxwell says can't happen.
Try using Maxwell with two wires, end-to-end [zero offset distance], current all flowing same direction.   Result would be zero.
With Ampere, a non-zero result.  And depending on the current, the non-zero forces can break equipment.
And the whole contraction thing was too good to pass up: it explained the Null result, fixed some things with electron packets.
When the same tool works in several areas, the tendency is to make it work everywhere.
By the time Quantum was getting its feet on the ground, a contraction formula for just about everything except Good Intentions existed.
So why all this work to fix the Standard Model, when the mortar used in the foundation is failing?