Imagine you are running in a dark forest, and then there’s a house whose door looks like a window, and you go out of that and find yourself on a bridge. Next, you see in the pond that there are marigolds instead of lotus, and you suddenly fall from the bridge and wake up immediately.
We all see these weird things in our dreams but never think about what they want to tell us. There were people in history who took their dreams earnestly and found answers for some of the world-changing discoveries. Let’s see who these people were and what was their findings.
NIELS BOHR (STRUCTURE OF ATOM )
So let’s start with something with which we all are made of everything in our surroundings, living or non-living, couldn’t exist without. Well, that is an atom. And when we say atoms, we remember a name attached to it: Niels Bohr, the father of atomic physics. This Danish physicist got a noble price in the year 1992.
He received it because he defined the structure of the atom. But do you know how he understood the design of the atom? Well, he did it when he was asleep in his dream. In her book Awakening at Midlife, a licensed psychologist named Kathleen i mentioned Niels as an example.
And she talked about his vision that led to one of the scientific world’s most significant discoveries of all time as Kathleen states that Niel used to repeatedly talk about one of his dreams. This was the same dream that led him to discover the structure of the atom. In his dream, he had seen a race of horses, and if you have ever seen a horse race, you might have noticed how horses run in the same lane.
Niels compared these same lanes with the orbit of electrons. Electrons move around the nucleus in their fixed orbit. And as soon as he woke up, he rushed toward his laboratory and started writing and drawing everything down, thus leading to the great invention of science.
DMITRI MENDELEEV (THE PERIODIC TABLE )
Now let’s talk about Dmitri’s periodic table of elements. He grew up in Syria, and when he turned 13, his family-owned glass factory was burdened by a fire accident. He had lost his father and now had nothing. So he, along with his mother, decided to shift to Saint Petersburg, which was the beginning of his journey toward science.
In a short time, he became a master of science. In 1867, he started writing a book named principles of Chemistry, published in 2 volumes. While working on the book, he realized that he likes to build a home, and bricks are used in the form of units. Just like that, to create anything in chemistry, elements are the basic units. And a systematic representation of all these elements will help people classify them and understand them better.
So he started working on the periodic table. He wrote all the elements and their atomic characteristics and weights on paper. But he couldn’t form a particular pattern to classify them based on consequences. This was only until he fell asleep on his desk. His eye opened, and he had the solution to his problems. He even noted down that pattern. He has said that in his dream, he saw all these elements arranged by atomic weights systematically in the form of a table.
SCIENCE AND SNAKES ( DISCOVERY OF BENZENE RING DNA STRUCTURE )
Like in Mendeleev’s dream, elements were arranged by themselves, similar to what happened with German Chemist August Kekule. He had difficulty placing the benzene structure because the ratio of hydrogen and carbon atoms in benzene was different compared to other hydrocarbon compounds. One day while working, he fell asleep and in his dream, he saw something so revolutionary that it is now a whole new branch of chemistry.
In his dream, he saw atoms jumping on their own and arranging a formulation like a snake. The snake made of a bit caught its tail from his mouth, forming a ring. When he woke up, he realized benzene molecules formed on the rings of carbon atoms. These were aromatic rings that began a new branch of chemistry called aromatic chemistry.
This happened with another set of scientists. Until 1953 scientists were baffled about the actual structure of DNA. But in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick released a paper talking about the structure of DNA. In this paper, they proposed the double helix structure of DNA.
But do you know that behind this structure, there was a dream which helped this molecular biologist to come up with the solution to forming the structure of DNA? In that dream, they saw two snakes intertwined with each other. Some people say that they saw ladders instead of snakes. But anyway, it was a dream that made them discover such importance and get the Nobel Prize.
Our dreams are often illogical and bizarre, but these irrational dreams help us devise out-of-the-box solutions to the atom.
In his dream, he had seen a race of horses, and if you have ever seen a horse race, you might have noticed how horses run in the same lane. Niels compared these same lanes with the orbit of electrons. Electrons move around the nucleus in their fixed orbit. And as soon as he woke up, he rushed toward his laboratory and started writing and drawing everything down, thus leading to the great invention of science.
DMITRI MENDELEEV (THE PERIODIC TABLE )
Now let’s talk about Dmitri’s periodic table of elements. He grew up in Syria, and when he turned 13, his family-owned glass factory was burdened by a fire accident. He had lost his father and now had nothing. So he, along with his mother, decided to shift to Saint Petersburg, which was the beginning of his journey toward science. In a short time, he became a master of science. In 1867, he started writing a book named principles of Chemistry, published in 2 volumes.
When he was working on the book, he realized that just like building a home, bricks are used in the form of units. Just like that, to create anything in chemistry, elements are the basic units. And a systematic representation of all these elements will help people classify them and understand them better. So he started working on the periodic table.
He wrote all the elements and their atomic characteristics and weights on paper. But he couldn’t form a particular pattern to classify them based on consequences. This was only until he fell asleep on his desk. His eye opened, and he had the solution to his problems. He even noted down that pattern. He has said that in his dream, he saw all these elements arranged by atomic weights systematically in the form of a table.
