Feynman's words “What I cannot create, I do not understand” inspire us to use the power of topology and chirality to experimentally re-produce phenomena and "bring to life" theories from diverse fields like particle physics and cosmology. Even physically-sound models that turned out not describing the real World around us can materialize in the artificial "meta-World" table-top experiments that we meticulously design. I will first discuss how vortex knots in chiral liquid crystals can exhibit atom-like behavior, including fusion, fission and self-assembly into various crystals with giant electrostriction properties. These findings will let us admire the beautiful history of the early model of atoms by Lord Kelvin, as well as the very last poem by Maxwell related to it. I will then show that these vortices interact with light similar to what was predicted for the elusive cosmic strings, with knots and crystalline arrays of vortices allowing to spatially localize beams of light into closed loops and knots.