some fascinating incidents from the lives of great people throw light on the importance of seeing a dream and pursuing it, at times, literally.
The following two incidents reveals the same:
incident1:
One of the most brilliant German chemists of the 19th century,Friedrich August Kekule had been working for quite some time to solve the structural riddle of the benzene molecule. One night while working late, he fell asleep on a chair and dreamt of atom dancing before him forming various patterns.
One evening in 1865 when kekule was writing his textbook, he had another dream.he saw the atoms dancing before his eyes again.He saw "long rows" of atoms "twining and twisting in snake-like motion" until one of the snake like forms seized its own tail, creating a ring, and began to whirl in a circle.Then, as if "by flash of lightning" Kekule woke up and began to develop the graphical formula for benzene from these dream forms.He suggested a closed ring of six carbon atoms in a regular hexagon,to each of which a hydrogen atom was attached.
Until today scientists accept the basic ring structure of benzene, as proposed by Kekule (although with much modification).
incident 2:
another German born physiologist,Dr.otto Loewi had a dream that led him to a great discovery. It was in the early 1900s that scientists first proposed the idea of chemical transmission of nerve impulses, however 15 years later it was still just a hypothesis. But a dream was about to change all that.
Before Easter Sunday, in 1920, Dr. Loewi dreamt of an experiment he could conduct that would prove once and for all how nerves impulses were transmitted. He woke up from his dream and scribble down the experiment on a scrap of paper and returned to sleep. But when he woke up the next morning he could not read his scribbles.
Luckily,he had the same dream the next night. He dreamt of the design of an experiment to prove his theory that nerve impulses were transmitted chemically,not electronically.
The experiment turned out to be the foundation for the work,which years later won him a Nobel prize for medicine,he shared the award with Sir Henry Hallett Dale.(really, a man with big heart,isn't he?? )
