Question: What's the coolest thing about making crystals?

Sumit Konar answered on 5 Mar 2019:

crystals are the tiniest building block. They are like bricks stacked together in all three dimensions. If you want to know how strong your brick-house will be; you need to know how strong is one single brick?
now all solids do not form crystals easily; that means all the bricks are not stacked in order, they stay randomly. now we need to stack them in an order; that is called crystal-making (crystallisation). We can make crystal in many ways; a) you can melt them and cool it slowly or b) you dissolve in water or some other liquid (solvent) and evaporate the liquid slowly etc. it can take hours or days to grow good quality crystal.
crystals have beautiful shapes and you will love them when you make them. Coolest thing will be, you can now use X-ray to pass through your crystal. X-ray diffracts and gives tiny spots. You can then analyse spots with software, and you then solve the structure and you can be very proud of it. As I said, all properties of the solid is hidden in the crystal. So now you know everything about your solid. Isn’t it cool?