Crystals can form from vapors, solutions, or molten materials. No one knows how the crystals can come together and make the formation. Crystals grow from the outside, unlike that of a human being. Particles are attracted to the seed of the formation and then build on up in an orderly pattern. Time and freedom are needed for the molecules to make perfect crystals.
Crystals can form from a solid, liquid, or gas.
Crystallographers are the people who study crystals. When scientists began asking many new questions about everything around them in the seventeenth century, the crystal meaning included many other materials than rock quartz and ice. These two took a very definite shape. Scientists then discovered that something was a crystal if it has a definite shape. Once scientists began to study the fascinating forms of crystals, a bright new science was born that is helping to answer some of the most important questions asked by men in almost every other scientific field today.