"...attributes may be maintained because of deformations in fields. Such conservation laws are called topological. Thus, it may happen that a knot in a set of field lines, called a soliton, cannot be smoothed out. As a result, the soliton is prevented from dissipating and behaves much like a particle. A classic example is a magnetic monopole, which has not been found in nature but shows up as twisted configurations in some field theories. In the traditional view, then, particles such as electrons and quarks (which carry Noether charges) are seen as fundamental, whereas particles such as magnetic monopoles (which carry topological charge) are derivative. In 1977, however, Claus Montonen, now at the Helsinki Institute of Physics in Finland, and David I. Olive, now at the University of Wales at Swansea, made a bold conjecture. Might there exist an alternative formulation of physics in which the roles of Noether charges (like electrical charge) and topological charges (like magnetic charge) are reversed? In such a “dual” picture, the magnetic monopoles would be the elementary objects, whereas the familiar particles—quarks, electrons and so on—would arise as solitons."