Energy-Ontological Particle Physics: A Unified Explanation of Vortex Topology, Topological Mass Locking, and Particle Attributes

Abstract The Standard Model of particle physics achieves high-precision agreement with experiments, yet its ontological foundation remains problematic: the origin of electric charge, the mechanism of mass generation, matter-antimatter asymmetry and CP violation are treated as postulates rather than derived consequences. This paper proposes an energy-ontological framework in which all microscopic particles are topological standing-wave vortices of a continuous energy fluid. Charge is not an intrinsic label but the observational projection of vortex handedness; matter and antimatter are not two kinds of substances but the same vortex viewed under different reference mirroring. Rest mass is taken to be the total locked energy of counter-propagating waves, motivated by a reversed analogue of Einstein's 1905 mass-energy thought experiment. A three-body topological shielding mechanism is proposed for proton and neutron structure, and a breathing-rotation 1:2 coupling is proposed for spin-1/2. The framework is formulated qualitatively and is intended to be compatible with topological soliton theory and quantum hydrodynamics; it does not claim to replace the mathematical machinery of the Standard Model. What it does claim is narrower: that the ontological interpretation of that machinery may be replaced by a more intuitive energy-vortex picture, with the two coexisting at current experimental precision. Three falsifiable predictions are stated, together with the principal quantitative gaps of the present work.