The Oracle of Night by sidarta Ribeiro & Daniel Hahn

Author:sidarta Ribeiro & Daniel Hahn [Ribeiro, Sidarta & Hahn, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Between real life and fiction, three different spheres of dream influence are dynamically, powerfully intertwined: narrative key, artistic inspiration, and political compass.

DREAMING AND SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY

Creativity involves a radical change in perspective, a recombining of prosaic ideas in order to produce the extraordinary. Oneiric creativity happens even when it is subjected to the quantitative rigor of science, fulfilling a fundamental role in its development. The best-known example is the discovery of the benzene ring by the organic chemist August Kekulé, as published in 1865.16 A few years earlier, Kekulé had correctly suggested that carbon is tetravalent, that is, that it makes four chemical bonds. He also knew that hydrogen makes only one chemical bond, and that the benzene molecule is made of six atoms of carbon and six of hydrogen. Kekulé was obsessed with discovering the structure of benzene, which could not be some linear combination because the number of carbon atoms was the same as the number of hydrogen atoms. Thinking extensively about the subject as he sat in front of a fire (or on a bus—there is some controversy over this), Kekulé described how he fell asleep and dreamed about a snake eating its own tail, like the alchemical symbol Ouroboros, whose origins go back to the funerary papyri of ancient Egypt.17 On waking, Kekulé had his answer in the shape of a very clear picture: the structure of benzene is hexagonal.

It may be that this famous case is a fabrication, as Kekulé was later accused of using the dream narrative to legitimize a piece of plagiarism he was committing, stealing ideas from the French chemist Auguste Laurent.18 The accusation is controversial, and the subject continues to be disputed in the history of chemistry.19

Another example of great scientific significance over which no such suspicions are hovering was the experimental demonstration of the chemical transmission of information between the nervous system and the heart, carried out by the German physiologist Otto Loewi. At the time when Loewi became interested in this subject, a controversy was raging about the nature of this communication: was it chemical or electric? Otto Loewi described his experience thus:

In the night of Easter Saturday, 1921, I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at six o’clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. That Sunday was the most desperate day in my whole scientific life. During the next night, however, I awoke again, at three o’clock, and I remembered what it was. This time I did not take any risk; I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, made the experiment on the frog’s heart…and at five o’clock the chemical transmission of the nervous impulse was conclusively proved.20

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