Quarks as Non‑Entities: The Nucleon as a Bound Positive‑Negative Electron Cluster and the Charge‑Packet Ontology

The Standard Model posits quarks as the underlying entities of nucleons: fractional charges (+2/3, −1/3), color charge, confined within hadrons. This paper does not deny the fitting power of the parton model for deep‑inelastic scattering (DIS) cross sections; it denies the ontological presupposition that quarks are physical entities. We propose and argue that the nucleon interior consists of bound positive‑negative electrons (charge packets) interlocked into a topologically ordered spherical network — a charge cluster. The neutron comprises equal numbers of positive and negative packets and is globally neutral; the proton contains one extra positive packet and carries net +1; the two differ by exactly one packet. β⁻ decay is the neutron's loss of one negative packet to become a proton; electron capture / β⁺ decay is the proton's uptake of one negative packet to become a neutron — requiring no quark "flavor change", no intermediate‑vector‑boson entity, and no physical neutrino in β decay. The neutrino mass upper limit from tritium decay is only a fitting parameter; high‑energy events at the South Pole can be interpreted as composite coupled states of charge packets, with even numbers of packets for neutral states and limited mass drift. We further demonstrate that baryon‑antibaryon annihilation exhibits strong spin‑orientation dependence: the product channels are determined by the relative angle of the spin axes of the colliding clusters. After subtracting the long‑range Coulomb effect, the core annihilation laws are highly consistent across four baryon‑antibaryon combinations: proton‑antiproton, neutron‑antineutron, proton‑antineutron, and neutron‑antiproton. We also propose the nucleon transparency criterion: small‑angle forward electron scattering events correspond to void channels in the discrete charge cluster, serving as a discriminator between the discrete cluster model and the continuous parton sea model. From eight independent experimental facts plus two new criteria, we converge inversely to the conclusion: quarks are phenomenological fitting labels, the particle zoo is the fragmentation spectrum of charge clusters, and the Standard Model should be demoted to an electromagnetic phenomenological computational framework. We also provide a spin and angular‑momentum mechanism, a resolution of the proton spin crisis, a mass ontology, and a verdict on neutrinos. We clarify the epistemological nature of quantum probability: the uncertainty principle and probability clouds are statistical representations of many‑body systems, not intrinsic randomness of the microscopic world. Quantum entanglement, the sole phenomenon not yet incorporable, is explicitly designated as a boundary.