As a materials scientist I have to vote for quasicrystals. On top of not receiving the Nobel prize, Dan Shechtman had to observe and decrypt the meaning of diffraction patterns that were so strange people thought his machine was malfunctioning.

Humans have no known way of producing quasicrystals in bulk, but amazingly we have found that meteorites (e.g. the Khatyrka) can have them. Something about traveling through deep space for millions of years...

Quasicrystals can be modeled as crystals in the N+1’th dimension.

Princeton mathematicians recently simulated a 1D crystal where the location of the atoms on the 1D grid was set to the first few tens of millions of prime numbers. The resulting diffraction pattern was quasi-crystalline...