Question: Why do you like crystals so much

Susana Teixeira answered on 16 Jun 2013:

My very first reason is totally selfish and self-centred: cause they are pretty and I made them! My second and most sensible reason is because they help me do my work. They have molecules all oriented in the same way in a tiny volume, and this makes them react much stronger when we probe them with some form of light.
It’s like a crowd of people all facing you, shouting the same words of a sentence at the same time. You will hear them loud and clear. While if they decide to turn to random directions and start saying the words in a scrambled order, and not all at the same time, you won’t understand the message. Crystals are the crowd of molecules all behaving the same way, so it is easier to measure some of their properties.