Reproduced with the permission of Willis Harman, President, Institute of Noetic Sciences.
The initial appearance of the idea as a hunch...seems to follow the pattern of many...discoveries.
If you close your eyes for a moment and invoke the image of your own home, you will see many objects that are the products of synthetic chemistry. The drapes, the floor covering, ...your clothing, the dyes in the food and some of the food itself, everything made of plastic - virtually the entire material superstructure of the ideal consumer household - are the produces of laboratory chemistry.
It would be a gross simplification to point to a single breakthrough or thinker as the foundation of the great collective enterprise of such a vast branch of science. But few chemists or historians of science would dispute that the dream-inspired structural theory of August Kekule von Stradonitz, known as Kekule, was one of the critical foundations of organic chemistry. Kekule's vision of molecular structure has been called "the most brilliant piece of prediction in the whole history of science."
In the mid-nineteenth century, the most perplexing challenge in the new science of chemistry was the problem of analyzing the molecular structure of chemical compounds. The new atomic theories gave chemists a way to envision models of the molecular building blocks of the compounds know in nature, but the way in which these building blocks were fitted together to make those compounds was a great puzzle. Not only the development of the theory, but the possibility of ever applying chemical theory to creating new substances, was blocked by the problem of structure.
Because of their abundance and apparent importance, compounds containing the element carbon were of special interest - in fact, the broad definition of organic chemistry is "the chemistry of compounds containing carbon." one of the critical puzzles was the structure of benzene. Chemists felt certain that if they could only figure out how the carbon atoms were arranged in this compound, they could begin deciphering the structure of many others.
Keklue, a Flemish professor living in London, spent a number of years experimenting and thinking about possible ways molecules might connect to one another. As with similar instances in Einstein's and Poincare's lives, the first of two key visions came to Kekule while he was riding aboard a streetcar. He related the story in a famous lecture he gave to a society of chemists toward the end of his career:
One fine summer evening, I was returning by the last omnibus, "outside" as usual, through the deserted streets of the metropolis, which are at other times so full of life. I fell into a reverie, and lo! the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. Whenever, hitherto, these diminutive being had appeared to me, they had always been in motion; but up to that time, I had never been able to discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one embraced two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller; whilst the whole kept whirling in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain...I spent part of the night putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms.
This image, or quasi-hallucination, of dancing atoms in the form of "diminutive beings," continued to haunt the chemist, but did not immediately lead to his famous insight. The moment of greatest illumination, in which the image engendered a new kind of understanding of the role of carbon atoms in molecular structure, came years later, in the form of a dream:
I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by the flash of lightning I awoke...Let us learn to dream, gentlemen.
The chemists in Kekule's audience assuredly got the point: benzene is a "cyclic" or "ring" structure, and the carbon chain at the molecular core of the compound does indeed form a chain that swallows its own tail.
Kekule's dream marks a significant contribution to the study of creativity as well as the field of chemistry, for it is perhaps the single most often cited example of unconscious functioning in scientific discovery.