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What did the kekule dream about and helped him discover the formula? Seven brilliant ideas that appeared in a dream

Dmitry Mendeleev saw his table in a dream, and his example is not the only one. Many scientists admitted that they owe their discoveries to their amazing dreams. From their dreams not only the periodic table, but also the atomic bomb came into our lives.

“There are no mysterious phenomena that cannot be understood,” said Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the great French scientist, philosopher, mathematician, physicist and physiologist. However, at least one inexplicable phenomenon was well known to him from personal experience. The author of many discoveries made during his life in various fields, Descartes did not hide the fact that the impetus for his diverse research was several prophetic dreams he saw at the age of twenty-three.

The date of one of these dreams is known precisely: November 10, 1619. It was that night that the main direction of all his future works was revealed to Rene Descartes. In that dream, he picked up a book written in Latin, on the very first page of which a secret question was written: “Which way should I go?” In response, according to Descartes, “The Spirit of Truth revealed to me in a dream the interconnection of all sciences”.

How this happened is now anyone's guess; only one thing is known for sure: the research that was inspired by his dreams brought Descartes fame, making him the greatest scientist of his time. For three centuries in a row, his work had a huge impact on science, and a number of his works on physics and mathematics remain relevant to this day.

Surprisingly, dreams of famous people who prompted them to make discoveries are not so uncommon. An example of this is Niels Bohr's dream, which brought him the Nobel Prize.

Niels Bohr: visiting the atoms

The great Danish scientist, founder of atomic physics, Niels Bohr (1885-1962), while still a student, managed to make a discovery that changed the scientific picture of the world.

One day he dreamed that he was on the Sun - a shining clot of fire-breathing gas - and the planets were whistling past him. They revolved around the Sun and were connected to it by thin threads. Suddenly the gas solidified, the “sun” and “planets” shrank, and Bohr, by his own admission, woke up as if from a jolt: he realized that he had discovered the model of the atom that he had been looking for for so long. The “sun” from his dream was nothing more than a motionless core around which “planets” - electrons - revolved!

Needless to say, the planetary model of the atom, seen by Niels Bohr in a dream, became the basis for all subsequent works of the scientist? She laid the foundation for atomic physics, bringing Niels Bohr the Nobel Prize and world recognition. The scientist himself, all his life, considered it his duty to fight against the use of the atom for military purposes: the genie, released by his dream, turned out to be not only powerful, but also dangerous...

However, this story is just one in a long series of many. Thus, the story of an equally amazing nocturnal insight that moved world science forward belongs to another Nobel laureate, the Austrian physiologist Otto Levi (1873-1961).

Chemistry and life of Otto Lewy

Nerve impulses in the body are transmitted by an electric wave - this is what doctors mistakenly believed until the discovery made by Levi. While still a young scientist, for the first time he disagreed with his venerable colleagues, boldly suggesting that chemistry was involved in the transmission of nerve impulses. But who will listen to yesterday's student refuting scientific luminaries? Moreover, Levy’s theory, for all its logic, had practically no evidence.

It was only seventeen years later that Levi was finally able to carry out an experiment that clearly proved he was right. The idea for the experiment came to him unexpectedly - in a dream. With the pedantry of a true scientist, Levi spoke in detail about the insight that visited him for two nights in a row:

“...On the night before Easter Sunday 1920, I woke up and made a few notes on a piece of paper. Then I fell asleep again. In the morning I had the feeling that I had written down something very important that night, but I could not decipher my scribbles. The next night, at three o'clock, the idea came back to me. This was the idea of an experiment that would help determine whether my hypothesis of chemical transmission was valid... I immediately got up, went to the laboratory and performed an experiment on a frog heart that I had seen in a dream... Its results became the basis for the theory of chemical transmission of nerve impulses "

Research, in which dreams made a significant contribution, brought Otto Lewy the Nobel Prize in 1936 for his services to medicine and psychology.

Another famous chemist, Friedrich August Kekule, did not hesitate to publicly admit that it was thanks to a dream that he managed to discover the molecular structure of benzene, which he had previously struggled with for many years without success.

Kekule's snake ring

By Kekule’s own admission, for many years he tried to find the molecular structure of benzene, but all his knowledge and experience were powerless. The problem tormented the scientist so much that sometimes he did not stop thinking about it either at night or during the day. Often he dreamed that he had already made a discovery, but all these dreams invariably turned out to be just an ordinary reflection of his daily thoughts and worries.

This was the case until the cold night of 1865, when Kekule dozed off at home by the fireplace and had an amazing dream, which he later described as follows: “Atoms were jumping before my eyes, they merged into larger structures, similar to snakes. As if spellbound, I watched their dance, when suddenly one of the “snakes” grabbed its tail and danced teasingly before my eyes. As if pierced by lightning, I woke up: the structure of benzene is a closed ring!

This discovery was a revolution for chemistry at that time.

The dream struck Kekule so much that he told it to his fellow chemists at one of the scientific congresses and even urged them to be more attentive to their dreams. Of course, many scientists would subscribe to these words of Kekule, and first of all his colleague, the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, whose discovery, made in a dream, is widely known to everyone.

Indeed, everyone has heard that Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev “spied” his periodic table of chemical elements in a dream. However, how exactly did this happen? One of his friends spoke about this in detail in his memoirs.

The whole truth about Dmitry Mendeleev

It turns out that Mendeleev’s dream became widely known thanks to the light hand of A.A. Inostrantsev, a contemporary and familiar scientist, who once came into his office and found him in the darkest state. As Inostrantsev later recalled, Mendeleev complained to him that “everything came together in my head, but I couldn’t express it in a table.” And later he explained that he worked without sleep for three days in a row, but all attempts to put his thoughts into a table were unsuccessful.

In the end, the scientist, extremely tired, went to bed. It was this dream that later went down in history. According to Mendeleev, everything happened like this: “in a dream I see a table where the elements are arranged as needed. I woke up and immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper - only in one place did a correction later turn out to be necessary.”

But the most intriguing thing is that at the time when Mendeleev dreamed of the periodic table, the atomic masses of many elements were established incorrectly, and many elements were not studied at all. In other words, starting only from the scientific data known to him, Mendeleev simply would not have been able to make his brilliant discovery! This means that in a dream he had more than just an insight. The discovery of the periodic table, for which scientists of that time simply did not have enough knowledge, can be easily compared to foreseeing the future.

All these numerous discoveries made by scientists during sleep make us wonder: either great people have revelation dreams more often than mere mortals, or they simply have the opportunity to realize them. Or maybe great minds simply don’t think much about what others will say about them, and therefore do not hesitate to seriously listen to the clues of their dreams? The answer to this is the call of Friedrich Kekule, with which he concluded his speech at one of the scientific congresses: “Let us study our dreams, gentlemen, and then we may come to the truth!”.

Benzene has an unusual odor; its vapors are asphyxiating and even carcinogenic; it burns, emitting impressive black smoke; its formula, as textbooks tell us, is C 6 H 6, where six carbon atoms form a ring, or “cycle”. Among other remarkable properties (such as being the basis for many dyes, insecticides, explosives and plastics), it is as transparent as water, so a glass object immersed in benzene becomes completely invisible! But that's not all: this little magical liquid has a far from trivial story. An explanation of its structure filled the chronicles in the mid-19th century and continues to amaze to this day. Just think: it was opened in a dream!

I moved my chair closer to the fire and fell into a doze. Again atoms began to swirl before my eyes.<…>Long chains, often tightly woven, moved continuously, coiling and developing like snakes. But what is it? One of the snakes grabbed its tail and circled in front of my eyes, as if teasing me. I woke up from a hunch that pierced me...

The man who “saw” in a dream the formula for benzene, which all his colleagues had been looking for for many years, was named Friedrich August Kekule. In that era (1865), when chemists were debating atoms, which some considered to exist in reality, and others only as a convenient scientific abstraction, Kekule made his choice: he not only recognized their reality, but also continuously saw them in his dreams, with your inner eye. And in fact, this was not the first time this happened to him. Seven years earlier, atoms had already danced before his eyes as he rode in an omnibus through the streets of London. He then concluded that carbon atoms could link together in long chains, thereby laying the foundations (given the four bonds by which carbon can link with its neighbors) of organic chemistry. This science achieved unprecedented success at the end of the 19th century, since it finally made it possible to synthesize organic substances and showed that living beings are not at all alive because, as previously believed, they were “breathed into life.”

It may be surprising that chemists made the journey from chain to cycle at the same time when people learned to pedal a bicycle: the first chain drive was invented in 1869... Less surprising is the idyllic picture combining a snake with Newton's apple. But seriously speaking, it is not difficult to imagine the indignation of those who believed in God more than in atoms at the rather gray statements of chemists, from which the redundancy of Divine intervention in the creation of life directly followed. Moreover, the dream of the creator of organic chemistry was completely esoteric. A snake biting its tail is Ouroboros, a symbol of the unity of matter and the Universe, the sacred cycle of creation, in which generation alternates with devouring. Simply put, this is an image closely related to the famous “all in all,” and also, if you like, to the “and vice versa,” which introduces the necessary clarification.

But, oddly enough, it was not theologians who spoke out most vehemently against Kekule’s dream, but the chemists themselves. There could be no question of building a new science, which had just been cleared of the alchemical heritage with great difficulty, on the basis of a dream of a snake biting its tail. Without knowing it, Kekule touched a delicate chord... which continues to resonate to this day. A year later in a German specialist magazine Chemische Berichte A drawing appeared depicting two benzene rings, each of which consisted of six macaque monkeys holding each other by the tail. After this, the dream was repeatedly subjected to similar attacks from honest chemists: the last one dates back to 1985, when the American Chemical Association devoted one of its annual meetings to the issue of benzene. Two American chemists spoke at it, arguing that Kekule could not see his famous formula in a dream.

The abundance of spilled ink and wasted paper for the sake of some dream cannot be explained either by a rejection of alchemy, which was, whether we like it or not, the ancestor of chemistry, or by some kind of theological rigor, so we have to look for another reason. Like Newton, who, by the way, spent long months fanning his alchemical furnaces, Galileo or Einstein, grace descended on Kekul - moreover, grace in the very sense that the adherents of ancient esoteric teachings gave it. The book “La Fontaine on the Love of Science” is a classic of alchemical literature, it was written in 1413 by the Valenciennes Jean de La Fontaine, and it describes point by point how knowledge descends on initiates. You can bet that the popular myth of “descended knowledge” has its origins here. In fact, four and a half centuries before Kekulé, Jehan had no less a penchant for prophetic dreams, and two and a half centuries before Newton appreciated the delights of orchards:

And, having dined, I fell asleep,
Sitting in that garden;
And it seems to me now,
I spent a long time in oblivion,
The reason for this is pleasure,
What the dream showed me.

In a dream, Jehan meets “two beautiful clear-eyed ladies,” namely Wisdom and Knowledge. They revealed to him that:

Science is God's gift, and, without a doubt,
It is given only by inspiration.
So be it! It was given by the Creator,
But I am always inspired by people.

These flowery verses contain something unacceptable for the chemists of yesterday and today. The injustice of the fact that someone manages to find a solution in a dream (“Why did the Savior’s angels choose them?” asked Infeld), while others work until they sweat blood, but cannot reach the promised lands; the very fact that truth is given away freely, when it should be acquired only as a result of scrupulous work in bringing together various contradictory data, searching for the meaning hidden in them. Science is built entirely on experience and reason, even if we assume - after all, nothing is perfect - that some of its roots are hidden in the alchemist's retort.

The Kekule snake became famous because it crawled into this (mythical) crevice that separates the scientific from the unscientific. Completely denying the possibility of learning the fundamental truth from a dream, chemists took a position as dogmatic as popular wisdom, never doubting Divine revelation for a moment. A tireless worker and a convinced rationalist, Kekule apparently managed to take advantage of that favorable state of mind that arises in half-sleep, when consciousness slowly fades away, when scientific rigor, enveloped in drowsiness, gradually softens, when familiar arguments change order in an unusual way, falling into place like parts puzzles. Of course, the fact that a certain number of problems - chemical, mathematical and others - were solved in a state of half-asleep is of greater interest from the point of view of physiology than revelations. And if passions have flared up around the notorious snake Kekule, it is only because the border between consciousness and body or between science and folk wisdom is as elusive as a snake that has barely dozed off.

Notes:

CERN - European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva. (Approx. Transl.)

Chemistry messages (German).

Translation by V. S. Kirsanov.

In this article you can find out all the questions and all the answers in the game "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" for July 22, 2017.

Questions for the first pair of players

Daria Poverennova and Alena Sviridova (200,000 - 200,000 rubles)

1. What do you call the truth if it is not very pleasant?

2. Who missed the mark in the fairy tale about Mowgli?

3. Who did the Tula masters master in Leskov’s tale?

4. What is the name for a short dress without sleeves and a collar for special occasions?

5. Who did Vaska the cat listen to in Krylov’s fable?

6. What delicacy is obtained as a result of the explosion?

7. What is the unofficial name of the Maly Theater in Moscow?

8. In the shade of which trees, still growing in Kolomenskoye, according to legend, did the future Tsar Peter the Great study?

9. What can you find on a star map?

10. Who did fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli collaborate with to create a jacket with pockets in the form of drawers?

11. What was the name of the cabbie stop in the city in Russia of the century before last?

12. Excess of what element in the body did Hippocrates consider the cause of melancholy?

13. What did the chemist Kekula dream about and help him discover the formula for benzene?

Questions for the second pair of players

Irina Mazurkevich and Alexander Pashutin (100,000 - 100,000 rubles)

1. Who or what in Lermontov’s poem turns white “in the blue sea fog”?

2. What do soldiers do on the battlefield?

3. What do you call a book that is often reread?

4. What word is used to encourage a musician to play more cheerfully?

5. How to continue the song from the movie “Straw Hat”: “I’m getting married, I’m getting married, what could be...?

6. What kind of clock is the icon that appears on the monitor screen in standby mode?

7. What do the words “He forced himself to be respected” from Eugene Onegin mean?

8. What is the name of the main character of the film “Spring on Zarechnaya Street”?

9. What is placed on the rail to block the train wheels?

10. Which poet’s wife was the daughter of Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev?

11. What phraseological unit did not originate from the custom of branding criminals in Rus'? brand with one mark

Answers to questions from the first pair of players

bitter
Akela
flea
cocktail
cooks
popcorn
"Ostrovsky's House"
hair
S. Dali
stock exchange
Earth
tail biting snake

Answers to questions from the second pair of players

sail
are chopped
tabletop
toys
sand
Alexander
shoe
A. Blok
brand with one mark

Questions for the third pair of players

Alexander Gordon and Yulia Baranovskaya (100,000 - 100,000 rubles)

1. What can you configure on your phone?

2. What do they say about a place that is located somewhere very far away?

3. What did the heroine of the song performed by Marina Khlebnikova promise to pour for her beloved?

4. What word was not included in Lenin’s slogan about the Bolshevik Party?

5. What is the name of an architectural decoration in the form of a blooming flower with identical petals?

7. Which team recently sensationally became the English football champion for the first time in history?

8. What Old Slavic word was used to call fat?

9. What muse, as the Greeks believed, patronizes dancing?

10. Who was not played by Eldar Ryazanov in the movie?

11. What gave the city Izyum its name?

12. What can the helmeted basilisk lizard, which lives in South America, do?

Answers to questions from the third pair of players

answering machine
the devil's horns
a cup of coffee
glory
socket
Sergey Mikhalkov
Leicester City
Terpsichore
poet
run on water

Dreams are one of the most poorly understood physiological processes occurring in the human brain. The science that studies dreams is called oneirology and thanks to it, it was possible to find out that if we take into account the average life expectancy of a person at 70 years, then he will spend 23 years in sleep and a whole 8 years he will dream in the world of dreams.
Dreams play a huge role in our lives and thanks to them, several amazing discoveries have been made, the solution of which many venerable scientists have unsuccessfully struggled with while awake.

10. Anatomical structure of fossil fish

Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz is considered the founding father of modern American science and his most famous work is the five-volume Study of Fossil Fishes, published between 1833 and 1843.
One day he was working on a certain type of fossil fish, and the imprint of one of them was faintly visible on an ancient stone slab. He was so obsessed with the idea of finding out what this fish actually looked like that he ended up having a dream for two nights in a row where he clearly saw the fossil fish in great detail, but as soon as he woke up, he immediately forgot the dream.

On the third night, he left a pencil and a piece of paper next to the head of the bed and prayed that the dream would repeat itself once again. And that time he was lucky: he woke up, half asleep, sketched the outlines of an ancient fish and went back to sleep. And the next morning he was amazed at how closely his illustration matched the imprint on the stone slab.

9. Design of a sewing machine needle

When American inventor Elias Howe received a patent for a sewing machine in 1846, the main problem with the invention remained the needle. The eye of the needle and the thread that passed through it prevented the mechanism from piercing the fabric.
Howe struggled for a long time to solve this problem until he had a significant dream.

In a dream, a cruel and evil tyrant, under pain of death, ordered him to invent a sewing machine within 24 hours. When there was very little time left, Hou saw that the lord’s bodyguards had holes punched in their spear tips.

As soon as Elias woke up, he immediately rushed to his workshop and completed work on his invention.

8. Theory of relativity

When the future great physicist Albert Einstein was a young teenager, he had a strange dream, which ultimately had a great influence on the discovery of the Theory of Relativity. In the vision, Albert saw a group of cows inside an electric fence eating grass by stretching their heads through the wire, the animals calmly eating the treat because the wire was disconnected from the current. On the opposite side of the field, the physicist noticed a farmer who suddenly turned on the switch and turned on the electricity; the cows instantly jumped back.

The physicist approached the farmer and said how amazing it was to see such a synchronized jump of stupid animals, to which the farmer replied: “Oh no, you are mistaken, they did not jump back at the same time, but like fans in the stands, when they get up and sit down like sea waves.” This dream ultimately allowed Einstein to understand that the speed of light is the fastest value in the Universe, but it also has a speed limit. And the difference in his and the farmer’s perception of the same event allowed him to understand that time is relative.

7. Chemical synapse

On Sunday, in the predawn hours before Easter in 1921, the Austrian pharmacologist Otto Löwy suddenly woke up and began to quickly write something on a piece of paper, he dreamed of the result of an important experiment, and he captured it on paper, and then fell asleep again.
But when he finally woke up, to his great chagrin, he could not understand anything in the scribbles that he had written in his sleep. Luckily for him, the dream happened again the next night and on Monday morning, Löwy was able to successfully complete his experiment. He conducted an experiment on chemical stimulation occurring between two frog hearts.

As a result, 15 years later, in 1936, Otto Löwy received the Nobel Prize in the field of physiology and medicine, which the Nazis completely took away from him.

6. Structure of benzene

German organic chemist Friedrich August Kekule created his formula for benzene after a dream where he saw a snake biting its own tail - a symbol of Ouroboros. Kekule worked on the theory for a long time, but progress did not come until one evening he dozed off near his fireplace.

Upon awakening, the chemist realized that Ouroboros's shape was similar to that of benzene, with its six carbon atoms forming a ring. And although scientists nowadays try to avoid working with benzene because of its carcinogenic properties, Kekule’s amazing discovery is considered one of the most important tools for understanding the structure of elements similar in structure to benzene.

5. Mathematical proofs

Srinivas Ramanujan, one of the most famous Indian mathematicians, surprisingly did not receive any training in mathematics. And yet he created an incredible number of mathematical formulas and hypotheses, especially in the field of number theory. How did he do it?

According to the mathematician, the goddess Mahalakshmi, who favored his family, helped him in many of his works. Sometimes in dreams, the goddess showed Srinivas mysterious scrolls that depicted complex mathematical formulas. And when Ramanujan woke up, he wrote down these visions as he remembered, and most of them in the end turned out to be absolutely correct mathematical formulas.

4. Bohr model of the atom

In 1922, Danish physicist Niels Bohr received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his studies of atomic structure. An amazing discovery of the nature of the atom was made by a scientist in a dream. In one of his dreams, he saw all the planets of our solar system, which seemed to be fastened together by thin, luminous threads. When he woke up, the physicist realized that he could use the structure of the solar system as a template for studying the structure of the atom.
This discovery turned out to be very important, as it contributed to a deeper understanding of the physical processes occurring in atomic physics.

3. Scientific method of Rene Descartes

On November 10, 1619, the Swedish philosopher, scientist and mathematician Rene Descartes was very tired, exhausted after many hours of intense thinking and went to rest in his room. That night he experienced three unforgettable dreams.

In the first, a strong whirlwind picked him up and carried him away from the college building, and then lifted the scientist to a high and inaccessible cliff, where he was no longer subject to the effects of the elements. In the second, René Descartes was able to observe the destructive power of a hurricane from the outside and analyze its structure and structure.
And in the third dream, the scientist read a poem by the Latin author Ausonius. When Descartes woke up, he was overwhelmed by an unprecedented feeling of elation and joy, similar to religious ecstasy. Having interpreted his dreams, he decided that the entire structure of the Universe can be explained using the scientific method of deductive reasoning, which can be applied to absolutely all sciences.

2. Insulin for diabetics

442 N. Adelaide St., London, Ontario is the address where the Banting House is located, one of the most popular tourist destinations in Canada. Frederick Banting, one of the discoverers of the hormone insulin, once lived and worked in this house.
The main attraction in the house is the scientist's bed, where he had a dream about how to use insulin to treat diabetes.

October 31, 1920. Banting went to bed and in his dream he clearly saw the experiment that he had to carry out to get the desired result. When the scientist woke up, he successfully conducted an experiment and proved that insulin can be successfully used to treat diabetes. This amazing discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923.

1. Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements

The outstanding Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev gained worldwide fame after his discovery of the periodic table of elements. In the late 1860s, there was no means of accurately determining the weights of atomic elements, so it was almost impossible to correctly arrange the elements in a table. After many years of hard work, the scientist temporarily suspended his research and during this period, according to legend, he had a dream.

In a dream, he saw his desktop, where all the elements were strictly and organizedly arranged in the correct order.
Upon waking up, he immediately made adjustments to his work and eventually presented his table to the scientific world, which is still used by all chemists on the planet. But when Dmitry Mendeleev was asked if it was true that he came up with his table in a dream, the scientist always chuckled and answered that the table of elements he created was not a dream seen in a dream, but the fruit of many years of hard work.

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So, today is Saturday, July 22, 2017, and we traditionally offer you answers to the quiz in the “Question and Answer” format. We encounter questions ranging from the simplest to the most complex. The quiz is very interesting and quite popular, we are simply helping you test your knowledge and make sure that you have chosen the correct answer out of the four proposed. And we have another question in the quiz - What did the chemist Kekula dream about and help him discover the formula for benzene?

A. lost wedding ring
B. broken pretzel
C. curled up cat
D. snake biting its own tail

The correct answer is D – A snake biting its own tail.

The chemist F.A. Kekule, who discovered the benzene formula, dreamed of its prototype in the form of a snake biting its own tail - a symbol from ancient Egyptian mythology. After awakening, the scientist no longer doubted that the molecule of this substance had the shape of a ring.
Ouroboros - the main symbol of alchemy

Benzene C6H6, PhH) is an organic chemical compound, colorless, liquid with a pleasant sweetish odor. Aromatic hydrocarbon. Benzene is a component of gasoline, is widely used in industry, and is a raw material for the production of medicines, various plastics, synthetic rubber, and dyes. Although benzene is part of crude oil, it is synthesized on an industrial scale from its other components. Toxic, carcinogen.