Is QFT analogous to binary? Everything builds up from QFT?
Two recent popular books about QFT are:
Matt Strassler’s Waves in an Impossible Sea (no math, just hand-wavy analogies): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB3LZXR9/
Sean Carroll’s Quanta and Fields (tries to give you a basic understanding of the actual math): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593186605/
Unfortunately you're probably not going to be satisfied with that, at some point you need to connect these simulations to real measurable parameters and this is exceedingly non-trivial :/
Starting from the other end, pure old-school undergrad quantum mechanics is really the easiest way to connect to measurable quantities and this is why it's used in all of engineering, quantum optics etc. It just provides the right amount of detail.
I suspect that solving those collapses is key to connecting quantum mechanics to relativity, seems like a much more reasonable place to look than to invent even more fields like string theory does.
But for all normal practical purposes you don't need to solve that and can ignore it (which is both a blessing and a curse of course)
In the real world, a particle can be a lot of different things, but usually we use this word to describe small parts of larger objects. There is no much physical difference between a small grain of sand and a planet, but we use different words for them, while we use the same word for small things, which can be different by many orders of magnitude.
In the real world, a wave, is just a form of group behavior of particles, i.e. many particles are doing the same thing at once because of an interaction between them and some energy in a system. For example, merging of black holes makes waves in a galaxy, so we can watch that in super slow motion.
I thought the idea that a particle is an excitation of a quantum field was broadly accepted.