Identifiying analogies between and formulating laws applicable to various length scales is perhaps one of the fundamental aims of nanoscience and represents prime objectives towards the design of controllable nanoscale materials. On the one hand, materials such as colloidal superlattices present similarities to atomic crystals. On the other hand, the differences in fundamental driving forces that characterize these systems, and the difficulty of unambiguous objective investigations makes it difficult to understand to what extent the properties of supramolecular materials may really resemble those of atomic and molecular ones.