Currently right above an article titled "I'm building a Minecraft clone in hardware, on a tiny FPGA with 143kb of RAM" on the HN front page.
I studied a metallurgy subject that focussed on crystals as a bit of fillin in my electrical engineering degree. The thing is that large scale macro features like crystalline surfaces and grains are driven by atomic structure that was first deduced through x-ray imaging and then like.
Perhaps we're living in Minecraft with better resolution.