Fun facts about phonons

Today we just take it for granted that crystals are composed of periodic arrays of interacting atoms. However, that was only established definitively one hundred years ago.
I have been brushing up on phonons with Marder's nice textbook, Condensed Matter Physics.
There are two historical perspectives that I found particularly fascinating. Both involve Max Born.

In a solid the elastic constants completely define the speeds of sound (and the associated linear dispersion relationship). In a solid of cubic symmetry, there are only three independent elastic constants, C_11, C_44, and C_12.
Cauchy and Saint Venant showed that if all the atoms in a crystal interact through pair-wise central forces then C_44=C_12. However, in a wide range of elemental crystals, one finds that C_12 is 1-3 times larger than C_44. This discrepancy caused significant debate in the 19th century but was resolved in 1914 by Born who showed that angular forces between atoms could explain the violation of this identity. From a quantum chemical perspective, these angular forces arise because it costs energy to bend chemical bonds.

The first paper on the dynamics of a crystal lattice was by Born and von Karman in 1912. This preceded the famous x-ray diffraction experiment of von Laue that established the underlying crystal lattice. In 1965, Born reflected

The first paper by Karman and myself was published before Laue's discovery. We regarded the existence of lattices as evident not only because we knew the group theory of lattices as given by Schoenflies and Fedorov which explained the geometrical features of crystals, but also because a short time before Erwin Madelung in Göttingen had derived the first dynamical inference from lattice theory, a relation between the infra-red vibration frequency of a crystal and its elastic properties.... 

Von Laue's paper on X-ray diffraction which gave direct evidence of the lattice structure appeared between our first and second paper. Now it is remarkable that in our second paper there is also no reference to von Laue. I can explain this only by assuming that the concept of the lattice seemed to us so well established that we regarded von Laue's work as a welcome confirmation but not as a new and exciting discovery which it really was.

This raises interesting questions in the philosophy of science. How much direct evidence do you need before you believe something? I can think of two similar examples from more recent history: the observation of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both were exciting, and rightly earned Nobel Prizes.
However, many of us were not particularly surprised.
The existence of the Higgs boson made sense because it was a necessary feature of the standard model, which can explain so much.
Gravitational waves were a logical consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which had been confirmed in many different ways. Furthermore, gravitational waves were observed indirectly through the decay of the orbital period of binary pulsars.