To move a heavy carpet, it's easier to create a fold and push it. In metals, such a traveling fold is called a dislocation – it allows bending and forging. But a new theory shows: the fold itself consists of a chain of minute shifts. Each micro-shift is a tiny flattened ball that rotates under load. Lining up in a row, they give birth to a dislocation – just as collective vibration gives rise to quantum fields. The classical theory of dislocations turned out to be just a special case of a more general picture. This view explains why hardening stops working in nanomaterials – there, the chain doesn't have time to form. Surprisingly, the same logic works in superconductivity, where electron pairs carry current without loss. The idea of such defects came from geophysics: back in 1905, mathematician Volterra described ruptures in the Earth's crust as linear shifts – long before their discovery in metals.