The nearby Raman Institute has a wonderful museum containing all the samples which Raman, a Nobel Laureate, used in his experiments. I learnt of a wonderful mathematical model which naturally predicts a transition from reconstructive to displacive transformations, with the output also giving the trajectories of atomic motions involved in each mechanism.
The photograph in the middle at the top is of a glass slab which Raman used to study Hertzian contact. The glass surface is perfectly smooth, but each impact with a ball-bearing has caused cracking below the surface, as expected from theory. The strange images below are minerals flourescing in invisible ultra-violent light, in an otherwise pitch-black room (part of Raman's collection) .