Science dreams

When sleeping, people often know nothing, at that time the mind works unconsciously, but many problems are solved. In science, there is no shortage of myths about the dream of premonition that make sense of creativity. The following are famous dreams in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The dream about the benzene ring of Kekulé chemist

Benzene is used as a solvent and as an ingredient in explosives synthesis, discovered by British scientist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) in 1825, but after a few decades its structure is unknown.

It is understood that the benzene molecule is very symmetrical but it is unimaginable that there are six 4 valence carbon atoms and 6 hydrogen valence atoms with a combination of symmetry arranged to form a stable benzene molecule. determined.

One winter day in 1865, Friedrich August Kekulé (1829-1896), the German chemist sat asleep by the stove in the fatigue of his research. In the dream, together with the illusion of atoms, carbon molecules and hydrogen connected and dancing into a chain, he saw a snake, turning its head, mouth sticking its tail and spinning in front of it. .

Chemist Friedrich August Kekulé (Photo: utexas)

Kekulé suddenly awakens and understands that benzene is a ring-shaped material, which is a 6-sided benzene ring, at each vertex of this hexagon attaches a carbon atom and a hydrogen atom, as in the textbook. Faculty of organic chemistry that students are learning today.

Dream of nerve impulse chemical transmission of biologist Loewi

The night before Easter in 1921, Otto Loewi (1873-1961), an Austrian biologist (German-based, then settled in the US), was sleeping, suddenly awakened, reaching out to get a pen and paper and hurry write something down, then lie down to sleep again.

6 o'clock the next morning, when he woke up, he remembered last night I wrote something very important. Take a piece of paper from the table and see it, but you yourself don't know what you've written or drawn.

However, by 3 am the next morning, while sleeping, the idea of ​​running the night before had returned - it was an experimental method that could be used to prove a hypothesis Loewi had given 17 years ago. Is it correct or not.

Loewi immediately got up from the bed, ran to the lab, killed two frogs, took out two hearts, and soaked in physiological saline, in which a heart retained nerve No. 10 (nerve). remember the trough), the second fruit does not have nerve number 10.

He used electrodes to stimulate the number 10 nerve of the first heart to make the heart beat slowly. After a few minutes, bring this first heart-soaking solution into the second heart-containing device.

As a result, after a few minutes, the second heart started to pound. This experiment has shown that nerve does not directly affect muscles but through the release of some chemicals.

Biologist Otto Loewi (Photo: aeiou)

Nerve number 10 of the first heart when stimulated by electricity produces something, which dissolves in salt water and has an effect on the second heart. The theory of nerve impulse transmission has been discovered, which is the beginning of an entirely new field of research. Thanks to this discovery, Loewi received the Nobel Prize for medical physiology in 1936.

Mendeleyev's periodic table of chemical elements

There was an important dream that occurred on a night in February 1869, involving the 'chemical kingdom constitution' - the law of circulating elements. At that time, 63 chemical elements were discovered, but it was unclear how they were arranged.

Scientists are always concerned, given that certain chemical elements must be ordered according to a certain rule. The Russian chemistry professor Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev (1834-1907) was 35 years old at the time, searching for a lot of thinking about this issue.

One day, fatigue made him fall asleep and he dreamed. In his dream, Mendeleyev saw a page of tables containing many cells, and found that the chemical elements flooded each other into each appropriate box.

When he woke up, he quickly recorded the idea of ​​setting up this elemental arrangement table. The properties of the elements also increase with the increasing number of atomic numbers in the cells and appear with metamorphosis. In the table that Mendeleyev set up, with unknown elements, he left a blank and very soon after that new elements were found to be filled in these blanks.

Scientist Mendeleyev (Photo: users)

Mendeleyev's prediction of the nature of the orderly elements in the table was astounding, which was the periodic table of Mendeleyev's chemical elements.

Elias Howe's industrial sewing principle

Before the emergence of industrialization in garment manufacturing, sewing needles in the concept of many people were: sewing thread holes located at the top of the ' prison ', opposite the pointed tip of the needle. So when sewing, after the whole needle has passed through the fabric, only the thread will penetrate. This is the hand-crafted style.

But industrial sewing machines need only sewing thread to cross the fabric first. The inventors then applied two-needle and multi-needle methods, but the effect was very low. From the 1840s, Elias Howe (1819-1867), an American sewing technician, spent a lot of research on this issue.

One day, in his sleep, he dreamed of a group of barbarians cutting his head and putting in a pot to cook. He risked his life to crawl out of the pot, but he was threatened with death by a long spear, now he saw a hole in the spear.

Elias Howe (1819-1867) - (Photo: sewingcanada)

It was this dream that made Elias Howe decide to abandon the principle of manual sewing. Design a kind of curved needle, where the needle hole to thread the sewing thread is drilled at the tip, in combination with the bobbin, creating the machine seam.

In 1845, the first sewing machine of Elias was born, sewing productivity was much higher than skilled workers. The principle of industrial sewing was born.

Van Hoa