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The Carthorses of Creativity: Breakthrough Science
on the Clapham Omnibus
 One
of the most famous, and most controversial, dreams in the history of science
is the dream that revealed the shape of the benzene ring to German chemist
August Kekulé (1829-1896). Was it a sleep
dream, or an image that came in a lightly altered state of consciousness?
I went back to Kekulé’s own account, in his
writeup of the extempore speech he gave at the 1890 Benzolfest many
years after his visions, and compared rival translations of his remarks in
German. Something that struck me immediately was that his perception of the
“dance” of chemical elements was not a one-off affair. He described a
similar experience seven years earlier that gave rise to his theory of
chemical structures. He made it clear that in years between the two visions
he had developed a practice of seeing or thinking in visual
imagery.
In
his mid-20s, when he was living near Clapham Common in London, Kekulé
spent a long summer evening sharing his ideas with a friend and fellow
chemist who lived in Islington, on the other side of the city.
Riding home on the last bus, Kekulé
drifted intoas lulled a reverie (Traumerei) in which he saw atoms
“gamboling” and dancing and forming combinations. He understood, when he
analyzed their motions, that he had been given clear insights into chemical
structures. Up to this time, he had been unable to grasp the nature of their
motion. “Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to
form a pair; how a larger one embraced the two smaller ones…while the whole
kept whirling in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain,
dragging the smaller ones after them but only at the end of the chain.” He
stayed up late that night sketching these “dream forms”. This was the
origin of his theory of carbon bonding in chemical structures.
We
see three conditions for creativity at work in this incident: (a) immersion
in a subject, (b) sharing a developing idea with the right friend, and (c)
drifting or relaxing into a flow state, from which the “Eureka” moment
arises spontaneously..
Seven years later, a dream or reverie during an evening nap
showed Kekulé the chemical structure of the
benzene ring. He was now a professor in Ghent in Belgium. Dozing by the fire
in his darkened study, he again saw atoms “gamboling before my eyes.” Now
his inner sight “rendered more acute by repeated visions of the kind, could
distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows, sometimes
more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion.”
Then he was startled to see one of the “snakes” seize hold of its own tail,
and whirl “mockingly” before him. He was jolted out of his languorous state,
“as if by a lightning bolt.” The image of the whirling snake gave the
chemist the clue to the structure of the benzene ring. He spent most of the
night that followed working this up until he had shaped his theory.
Kekulé had become practiced in
receiving and developing helpful images in this way. When he described the
roots of his scientific creativity in the Benzolfest in his honor in 1890,
Kekulé told his audience, “Let us learn to
dream, gentlemen, then perhaps we shall find the truth.” He added the
salutary caution, “But let us beware of publishing our dreams till they have
been tested by the waking understanding.”
The images that came to
Kekulé
would have been meaningless, in terms of chemistry, to someone who did not
have a scientific mind that had long been working on the problems whose
solutions they revealed. The imagery might have sent an artist off to paint,
or sent someone with an interest in myth off to study the symbol of the
Ouroboros in the ancient world and in alchemy.
When
Kekulé
urged his audience to “dream”, he was surely not talking exclusively, or
primarily, about what happens in sleep. He was talking about developing the
ability to enter a state of relaxed attention in which ideas take form and
interact as images.
It is always exciting to know the specific ways
in which a creative mind enters that imaginal space. I kept thinking about
the revelation on the bus to Clapham, and how some of us,
lulled by the motion of other moving vehicles, have been gifted with similar
“aha” moments when an idea hidden in a collection of diffuse elements
suddenly leaps into clarity and form.
As I thought about
how Kekulé got his ideas, something occurred to me
that I had not seen in any of the scholarly articles I had read, let alone
the standard accounts in books on dreams and creativity. In the 1850s,
people did not travel in motorized buses. The public conveyance that carried
Kekulé home to Clapham, was a horse-drawn
omnibus.The clatter of the hooves and the jangle of the harness and the
rocking motion of the box carriage provided the soundtrack and the rhythm
for Kekulé’s breakthrough.
Wasn’t it likely that other creative minds of
his period had also been helped by the rhythms of a contemporary mode of
transportation? I vaguely remembered something I had read in a beautiful
essay by the French mathematician
Jules-Henri Poincaré
on his own creative process, and hunted up a copy of his paper,
“Mathematical Creation”.
Poincaré described that
when he came to a stuck point in his efforts to formulate a new mathematical
construct, he decided to give himself a break and traveled to Coutances to
join friends on a geological hike. Inspiration struck as he started to
boarding a horse-drawn omnibus. “At the moment when I put my foot on the
step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to
have paved the way for it.” When he went home to Caen, Poincaré
wrote up his theory of “Fuchsian functions” directly from this moment of
insight. Though in the mathematician’s account, the Eureka moment came as he
boarded the omnibus, rather than during the journey, we may wonder whether
his breakthrough had been assisted by previous rides with the carthorses of
creativity.
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Sources:
Kekulé’s
written version of his speech at the 1890 Benzolfest is translated by O.T.
Benfey, “August Kekulé and the Birth of the
Structural Theory of Organic Chemistry” in Journal of Chemical Education
1958, No. 35, pp. 21-23. For alternative translations and the original
German text, see Albert Rothenberg, “Creative cognitive processes in
Kekule’s discovery of the structure
of the benzene molecule” in The
American Journal of Psychology vol.
108, no. 3 (Fall 1995) pp. 419-38.
©
copyright Robert Moss 2007. All Rights Reserved.
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