It would have been hard to predict Google, Facebook and Twitter as results of the creation of the first transistor out of a chunk of silicon. Only when looking back do we see ages of stone and iron, technological revolutions named after the materials that spawned them. For today’s challenges we must look forward and learn how to design materials with specific electrical properties, and to build these materials from the atoms up. Today, at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC and Stanford, we are synthesizing materials with atomic precision and following the electrons using novel X-ray probes at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. This lecture explores our progress into the quantum world of materials and looks at how the next age will be forged.