Are Particles 'Physical Things' or 'Abstract Ideas'?

[Mudhammam]

No.  That particular argument settles only that something from Fukushima is somehow correlated with damage and death.  It doesn't settle whether there are real particles there in the something or somehow, or are the particles merely an unreal idea mistakenly assigned responsibility that rightly belong to a real something else.

(Bold mine)
But unless we're going to claim that all material causes and effects we perceive---and not simply their formulaic interactions that account for the "why" of the paths on which they proceed---are abstract, isn't it natural to presume that the "real something else" is physical? (Does it matter if we call it a particle or wave?)

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Ya put things clearer than I can.

That's genuinely encouraging! I had to rewrite a bunch of it a few times to ensure that I was even following own train of thoughts!

Nature has no basic nature.  It is what it is.
Distinctions between abstract and material, particle or wave, are artificial but required by us.

Perhaps but WE are nature, so it's almost as if one could say, at least in some small pockets of nature, the physical and the abstract are required BY NATURE to make it, to some degree at least, intelligible to itself. That these concepts work so well in explaining a record of nature that extends to the "beginning" of time (or the asymmetric "edge") and throughout its possibly infinite spatial magnitude, applying in all places we have been able to verify, leads me to think that these features represent something that is basic and universal, whether it's truly neither or somehow a dualism of both. By "basic" I mean nature as it is versus how creatures (that use equipment developed primarily for survival and not for solving the puzzles that a "deeper understanding" of reality's texture seems to offer) intuitively perceive and conceive it.