So, today is Saturday, July 22, 2017, and we traditionally offer you answers to the quiz in the “Question and Answer” format. We encounter questions ranging from the simplest to the most complex. The quiz is very interesting and quite popular, we are simply helping you test your knowledge and make sure that you have chosen the correct answer out of the four proposed. And we have another question in the quiz - What did the chemist Kekula dream about and help him discover the formula for benzene?
- A. lost wedding ring
B. broken pretzel
C. curled up cat
D. snake biting its own tail
The correct answer is D – A snake biting its own tail.
The chemist F.A. Kekule, who discovered the benzene formula, dreamed of its prototype in the form of a snake biting its own tail - a symbol from ancient Egyptian mythology. After awakening, the scientist no longer doubted that the molecule of this substance had the shape of a ring.
Ouroboros - the main symbol of alchemy
Benzene C6H6, PhH) is an organic chemical compound, colorless, liquid with a pleasant sweetish odor. Aromatic hydrocarbon. Benzene is a component of gasoline, is widely used in industry, and is a raw material for the production of medicines, various plastics, synthetic rubber, and dyes. Although benzene is part of crude oil, it is synthesized on an industrial scale from its other components. Toxic, carcinogen.
The concept of aromaticity.
The name “aromatic compounds” arose by chance, due to the fact that the first compounds of this series, isolated from natural resins and balms, had a pleasant aromatic odor.
For example, back in the 16th century, benzoic acid and benzyl alcohol were isolated from benzoic resin; from bitter almond oil – benzoaldehyde; from tolu balsam - toluene; from pine resin - cymol, etc.
Later it was found that the same structure and Chemical properties There are also many other substances that do not have a pleasant aromatic odor. Therefore, the name “aromatic substances” has lost its original meaning.
The German chemist Kekule was the first to notice that many aromatic compounds in ordinary chemical transformations retain a characteristic cyclic group of six carbon atoms and therefore benzene, as the simplest representative with a six-membered group, it was recognized as the ancestor of aromatic compounds.
Benzene was discovered in 1825 by Faraday, who isolated it from the condensed residues of illuminating gas obtained from coal. Faraday also determined the ratio of carbon and hydrogen in this compound to be 1:1.
In 1834, E. Mitcherley, by heating salts of benzoic acid (a substance isolated from natural aromatic resins), obtained the same compound and gave it the name gasoline. However, later J. Liebig suggested calling this substance benzene.
In 1845, Hoffmann isolated benzene from the distillation of coal tar.
Benzene and a number of its homologues, and then a large group of other compounds, soon after their discovery, were allocated to the group of aromatic compounds, as they had special “aromatic properties”:
benzene, despite its deep “unsaturation” (C 6 H 6), easily entered into peculiar substitution reactions of hydrogen atoms and difficultly entered into addition reactions characteristic of alkenes;
another feature that distinguishes aromatic compounds from alkenes is their high stability, ease of formation in a wide variety of reactions and the comparative difficulty of oxidation reactions;
Finally, the properties of some derivatives of aromatic hydrocarbons are very characteristic:
Aromatic amines are less basic than aliphatic amines;
Aromatic hydroxyl derivatives - phenols, have a much more acidic character than alcohols;
Aromatic halogen derivatives undergo substitution reactions much more difficult than aliphatic ones.
The totality of the listed properties was the “chemical criterion” with the help of which the belonging of a particular substance to aromatic compounds, its “aromatic character” was determined.
2. Development of ideas about the structure of benzene. Kekule's formula.
The structural formula of benzene as a cyclohexatriene system was first proposed in 1865 by a German chemist A. Kekule.
According to Kekula, benzene is a closed system with three conjugated double bonds - cyclohexatriene-1,3,5.
Kekule's formula correctly reflects:
1) elemental composition, the ratio of carbon and hydrogen atoms (1:1) in the benzene molecule;
2) the equivalence of all hydrogen atoms in a benzene molecule (monosubstituted benzenes do not have isomers - C 6 H 5 CH 3, C 6 H 5 Cl).
However, this formula does not meet many of the features of benzene:
1) being, according to the Kekule formula, a formally unsaturated system, benzene at the same time enters predominantly into substitution reactions rather than addition reactions. Why doesn't benzene decolorize bromine water?
2) this formula cannot explain the high stability of the benzene ring;
3) based on the Kekule formula, benzene should have two ortho isomers. However, only one ortho isomer is known.
4) and, finally, Kekule’s formula is not able to explain the equality of distances between carbon atoms in a real benzene molecule.
To get out of this difficulty, Kekule was forced to admit the possibility of a constant change in the position of double bonds in the benzene molecule and put forward theory of "oscillation" according to which double bonds are not fixed in one place:
In this regard, the concept of “aromatic compounds” and “aromatic properties” acquired a different meaning.
Aromatic steel compounds include compounds containing a six-membered cyclic group with three double bonds (benzene ring) and having special physical and chemical properties.
The contradictions between formal “unsaturation” and peculiar physical and chemical properties are explained only by quantum organic chemistry.
PPB on the way to the benzene formula.
Our task now is to find out the hidden mechanism for overcoming the cognitive-psychological barrier as an obstacle standing in the way of scientific and technological progress. Let's start with science.
At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, the concept of valency, or atomicity, was introduced into organic chemistry. Elements such as hydrogen and chlorine were recognized as monoatomic; diatomic - oxygen, sulfur;
Two more important circumstances were established: firstly, between two carbon atoms there could be not a simple bond, depicted by a single line, but a double bond (as in ethylene) or even a triple bond (as in acetylene);
secondly, the chain could branch while remaining open and giving different isomers. This explained the structure of compounds of the fatty (aliphatic) series.
But starting from the 40s of the 19th century, aromatic compounds began to play an increasingly important role in chemistry and the chemical industry, which are involved in aniline dye, perfume and pharmaceutical production. These compounds are derivatives of the simplest parent substance benzene SbNb. This is its empirical formula. The building was not installed for a long time.
The fact is that all six carbon atoms included in the benzene molecule are exactly the same.
Likewise, all of its six hydrogen atoms are also the same. Meanwhile, the method of writing formulas in the form of open chains, which had become generally accepted and turned out to be a barrier, could not express this sameness of all the carbon atoms of benzene, as well as the sameness of all its hydrogen atoms. In fact, the atoms at the edges of the chain will always and inevitably differ from the atoms contained within the chain. Therefore, all attempts to depict the formula of benzene in the form of an open chain invariably turned out to be untenable. We can rightfully say that the way of depicting formulas
organic compounds
As the author of the discovery, A. Kekule, later said, for a long time he puzzled over how it would be possible to express the identity of all carbon atoms in benzene and all its hydrogens. Tired, .
he sat down by the blazing fireplace and dozed off. Chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms flashed before his mind's eye like bright snakes. They made various movements, and then one of them closed in a ring.
This is how A. Kekule came up with a “hint” for the desired formula of benzene: the formula must be ring - only in this case, all six carbon atoms included in the benzene molecule can be equivalent to each other, as well as the six hydrogen atoms connected to them. A. Kekule woke up, sat down and wrote down the ring model of the benzene molecule that he had dreamed of.
That's what he said himself. We will call this kind of hint a cognitive-psychological springboard (or, in short, a springboard). It guides the scientist’s thought to the right path to the truth, which until then was closed to him by an unconscious barrier that stood on this path. It does not destroy this barrier, but indicates how it can be overcome or bypassed by our thought.
Random and necessary when overcoming PPB. Let's add the following to the above story. Even as a child, A. Kekule was present at the trial, where the case of a man who served as a footman for the old countess was heard.
He killed his owner and robbed her. Among her jewelry was a bracelet that fastened on her hand like a snake swallowing its tail. Therefore, some biographers of A. Kekule suggested that the idea of the ring formula of benzene could have been suggested to him by a childhood memory of this bracelet. A. Kekule himself had a cheerful character, was a joker and an inventor. He set out to create another version of how he came up with the idea of a carbon chain closing into a ring. He said that he was riding in London in an omnibus on the roof and saw that a cage of monkeys was being taken down the street to the circus, which were grabbing each other with their paws and waving their tails, and he supposedly thought that these were carbon atoms (tetraatomic), and their tails are hydrogens. Suddenly the grappling monkeys formed a ring, and he guessed that the formula of benzene must be a ring. One can easily imagine many other versions of a similar nature, for example: weaving a wreath with a floral strip closed into a ring; rolling a twig into a ring; closing
In all these cases, only one thing is essential and important: that the process of closing the two ends of some fairly straightforward object into a ring is observed. Observation of such a process, completely independent of what the object itself is, the ends of which are closed, and can serve as a hint or imitation of the solution to the problem.
Note that it was not necessary for the scientist to see any of the processes in this moment, and it is enough to remember it and the memory of such an image could serve him as a hint, and one to which he could not pay any attention at all and completely forget about it during the subsequent development of his discovery.
All the above versions are purely random, external to the creative process itself, and in no way connected with its essence.
However, what they had in common was that each of these random events, in its own way, imitated the same necessary process: closing an open circuit into a ring.
Here we see that the noted necessity was realized through an accident, which suggested to the scientist the path to solving the problem facing him. Other
In other words, chance here acted as a form of manifestation of necessity, as a form of its identification and capture.
At the same time, what is important for the course of scientific knowledge is, strictly speaking, the necessity itself, and not how randomly the scientist came to the discovery of this necessity.
Apparently, in the history of many scientific discoveries, the clue may not have been explicitly recorded by the scientist himself and could have been erased from his memory without a trace. Nevertheless, such clues took place in the history of science in much greater numbers than they were recorded by the scientists themselves, and even more so than they were told about, as in the case of A. Kekule.
Another aspect of the accidental and the necessary in scientific discovery. So, the first condition for a good hint is the presence of an imitation of the essence of the upcoming discovery. Therefore, chance in these conditions acts as a form of manifestation of necessity and an addition to it.
This approach is the best way to reveal and understand the internal mechanism of the emergence of a clue in the course of a scientific discovery. This can be shown by finding the formula for benzene using a hint, according to any of the above random versions. Here there really is an intersection of two completely independent necessary rows, and the hint itself is born exactly at the point of their intersection.
One of these series is associated with an intense search for an answer to the question posed by science itself about the structural formula of benzene. These searches within organic chemistry take place in the mind of A. Kekule as a necessary logical process for quite a long time and so far to no avail. thinking process not only is it not interrupted at the moment when something wedged into the life of a scientist occurs random process external character, but, on the contrary, continues-*
as persistently as before. The process external to it, in turn, is just as necessary in itself.
For example, a bracelet is made only to be fastened (closed) on the hand. Or, say, the delivery of monkeys to the London circus was necessary for the operation of this circus.
When both necessary and completely unrelated processes randomly intersected, then at the point of their intersection a hint just as randomly appeared: the open circuit must be closed into a ring. Thus, in this case, another side of the mechanism is revealed - the formation of a kind of springboard in the course of a scientific discovery.
Here we are dealing with the second condition for the occurrence of a hint. The condition must be met so that the search thought, aimed at solving an unsolved problem, is not interrupted at this moment, so that it persistently works on solving the unsolved problem. Only in this case can the second, that is, extraneous, external process serve as a hint (form a springboard) for overcoming the existing PPB. In fact, A. Kekule undoubtedly remembered from childhood the image of a bracelet in the form of a snake swallowing its tail. But this memory in itself told him nothing about organic compounds. Only one thing is important here: that such images come to his mind at the very moment when he was racking his brains over the formula of benzene, in other words, that both independent processes coincided with one another, intersected with each other, and with this intersection gave a new direction to scientific research thoughts of a scientist. In this case, we repeat, it does not matter at all whether the scientist observed any material process or only remembered it or even simply imagined it in his imagination.
The third is essential an important condition is that the scientist himself possesses associative thinking in a developed form. Only in this case would he be able to grasp, feel, notice some completely random connection (association) between the scientific task that was tormenting him and a completely unrelated, insignificant event of an everyday nature.
Only by possessing associative thinking to the proper degree is a scientist able to respond to a hint that comes to his aid and see in it the springboard he needs. Otherwise, he will pass by it without realizing that he could have used it.
Finally, the fourth condition is for the corresponding hint (springboard) to lead to positive result and really indicated the right path to the upcoming discovery, it is necessary that the scientist’s thought struggle for quite a long time in search of a solution to the problem at hand, so that it tries all possible options for solving it and, one by one, checks and rejects all the unsuccessful ones.
Thanks to this, the cognitive-psychological soil for making the only correct decision turns out to be sufficiently prepared in order to pick up the hint it needs, falling on a completely prepared soil. Otherwise, the scientist’s thought may ignore the hint given to her. As happens in the history of science, we saw A. Kekule in his long search for the formula of benzene. The same thing happened with D. Mendeleev, who for almost a year and a half (from the autumn of 1867 to the spring of 1869) tried to stubbornly adhere to Gérard’s ideas about the atomicity of elements and from these positions wrote the entire first part of “Fundamentals of Chemistry”.
These are the four necessary conditions the success of the functioning of springboards in overcoming PPB, the implementation of which ends with a scientific discovery. The latter acts in this case as a way out from the sphere of the unconscious into the sphere of the conscious, similar to suddenly falling from darkness into an illuminated place, as a kind of insight.
Analyzing the action of a hint (springboard) in the process of overcoming the hitherto unconscious PPB and linking this action with the presence and manifestation of associative thinking of a scientist, we have come close to analyzing the actual cognitive-psychological problems of scientific creativity. While we were considering the functions of the barrier and its action, we remained all the time in the sphere of the unconscious, because until the PPB is overcome, the scientist does not even know about its existence. Looking for solutions to the problem that confronts him, the scientist, as if in the dark, gropes towards the truth and comes across some strange obstacle.
When, out of nowhere, a springboard suddenly appears and takes him onto the path
to a decision, then it turns out to be like a suddenly flashing ray of light, indicating the way out of the darkness.
The scientist himself notes this moment, comparing it with an unexpected insight, enlightenment, or even inspiration (sometimes as if it came from above). With the words “a thought flashed,” “an idea flashed,” etc., the scientist actually states the moment when, from the darkness of the unconscious, his thought immediately emerged into the light of the conscious and saw a way to overcome a hitherto incomprehensible barrier standing on the path to the truth. Thus, the PPB, perceived for the first time, moves from the darkness of the unconscious into the realm of the conscious. Back in the 17th century, the German chemist Johann Glauber, who also discovered Glauber's salt
- sodium sulfate, distilling coal tar in a glass vessel, produced a mixture of organic compounds, which contained a subsequently famous substance called... but it’s worth talking about this in more detail. Glauber received a mixture of who knows what, the composition of which chemists figured out only two hundred years later. The substance in question was first isolated in individual form not a chemist at all, but the great physicist Michael Faraday from illuminating gas (obtained from the pyrolysis of coal, mined in abundance in England). But there was still no name until, in 1833, another German distilled the benzoic acid salt and obtained pure benzene, which was named after the acid. Benzoic acid itself is obtained by sublimation of benzoic resin, or dewy incense. What kind of bird is this? This is an incense resin (a relatively inexpensive substitute for real Middle Eastern incense) that slowly flows from a cut in the trunk of the Storax benzoin tree, native to Southeast Asia. The Arabs, confusing Java with Sumatra, called it luban jawi (Java incense). For some reason the Europeans decided that this is an article, and the remaining stub of the word was turned into “benzoin”.
It is curious that the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary notes that this substance was previously called “gasoline”, as they now call an expensive liquid, obtained, in turn, by the distillation of another viscous substance, due to the possession of which no less blood has been shed than is being poured today gasoline into the growling herds of cars. By the way, in English benzene is still called “gasoline”, and fuel for cars is called “petrol” (in England) or “gas” (in the USA). According to the authors, this confusion significantly disrupts the harmony of the universe.
Benzene is one of the legendary organic substances. Uncertainties regarding the structure of its molecule began immediately after the establishment of its chemical gross formula C 6 H 6 . Since carbon is tetravalent, it is clear that in this molecule there must be double or triple bonds between carbon atoms, to which only one hydrogen atom is attached - six by six, we have no more. The triple bond was immediately rejected because the chemical properties of benzene did not correspond in any way to the properties of hydrocarbons of the acetylene series with such bonds. But there was also something wrong with double bonds - in the 60s of the last century, many benzene derivatives were synthesized, obtained by adding various radicals to all six atoms. And it turned out that these atoms are completely equivalent, which could not have happened with a linear or somehow branched structure of the molecule.
Another German, Friedrich August Kekule, solved the riddle. Having become a doctor of chemistry at the age of 23, this child prodigy finally determined the valence of carbon as four; Then it was he who became the author of the revolutionary idea of carbon chains. Kekule can rightfully be considered the “inventor” of organic chemistry, because this is the chemistry of carbon chains (now, of course, this concept has expanded somewhat).
Since 1858, Kekule has been thinking hard about the structure of the benzene molecule. By that time, both Butlerov’s theory of structure and Loschmidt’s formulas, first compiled on the basis of atomic theory, were already known, but nothing worked with benzene. And then a legend arises - Kekula saw the cyclic formula of carbon in a dream. This is a very beautiful formula, even two, because we can arrange the double bonds in the molecule in different ways.
According to legend, Kekula saw a snake made of carbon atoms biting its own tail. By the way, this is a famous figure - ouroboros (from the Greek “tail-eater”). Although this symbol has many meanings, the most common interpretation describes it as a representation of eternity and infinity, especially the cyclical nature of life: alternation of creation and destruction, life and death, constant rebirth and death. Educated, with a perfect knowledge of four languages since childhood, Kekule, of course, knew about ouroboros.
Here the authors are forced to make some remark about the nature of the thinking of the average person, the so-called “ common man“, although who admits that he is a simple person? (Personally, we would never do it!) So, Kekula dreamed of benzene. Mendeleev - The periodic table, an angel showed Mesrop Mashtots the Armenian alphabet in a dream, and Dante - the text “ Divine Comedy" Who else dreamed about this? It seems to us that such legends somehow flatter the vanity of the average person - after all, everyone can dream, including me, but what exactly is another question. Needless to say, Kekule worked on establishing the formula for benzene, published in 1865, for more than seven years every day, seven days a week, since it is almost impossible to turn off your head on the weekend. Mendeleev worked on the classification of elements for a decade and a half! The conclusion is simple: we must not sleep, but work, which, by the way, Boris Pasternak wrote about: “Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, artist, / Don’t indulge in sleep, / You are a hostage to eternity / Captured by time.”
By the way, the legend of Kekule’s dream is sung in the poems of Alexey Tsvetkov, where the poet (who once studied at the Faculty of Chemistry at Odessa University) reflects on the place of chemistry in our lives:
if there was a painter he would paint in oils
A snake appears to the sleeping Friedrich Kekule
biting her own tail suggestively
on the structure of the benzene ring
Kekule himself in a cuirass helmet at a distance
apparently got tired of it during a short rest
against the background of a crimson dawn is indicated
sensitive profile of a hobbled horse
but before the formula is revealed to the world
someone should interrupt with a kiss
a natural scientist's magical dream to him
a sedan was slipped to the man who fell asleep on the eve
poisoned french apple
the homeland is in danger of losing priority
the snake wrapped itself in a carbon ring
valence bonds oscillate melodiously
the mission can be entrusted to urania
muse related discipline because the
chemistry does not have its own
but I feel a maiden with a light step from behind the trees
allegory of Germany she kisses the hero
lightly hits the sword on the shoulder
and the background calls him Stradonits both
carried away in a captivating dance
perhaps the choir joins in here
at least that's how I see it
boys pour out onto the stage in a crowd
jamming plastic bags
dance the glory of chemistry to the queen of sciences
mistress of mustard gas, goddess of phosgene
however, painting has long been powerless
it's more like a ballet libretto
The picture is quite bleak, to put it bluntly, but the authors are convinced that high poetry enlightens, even when it concerns the darkest topics.
Let's return to our benzene. In general, Kekule’s colleagues did not like the fact that two formulas could be assigned to the same substance. Somehow it’s not human, that is, it’s not chemical somehow. They didn’t come up with anything, even the formula for benzene in the form of a three-dimensional Ladenburg prism. However, note that all the other formulas in this figure are cyclic, that is, Kekule has already solved the main problem.
Chemical reactions of benzene with various substances did not confirm the correctness of any of these formulas, we had to return to benzene a la Kekule, but with some addition - they came up with the idea that double bonds jump from one carbon atom to another and those two Kekule formulas instantly change into each other, or using special term, oscillate.
Without letting our thoughts wander over the storax benzoin tree, let us outline the current state of affairs with the molecule of our hexagonal beauty. There are no more double bonds in it than monkeys holding hands. The carbon atoms in the plane are connected by ordinary single bonds. And below and above this plane there are clouds of so-called pi bonds, making the chemical abilities of each of the 6 carbon atoms identical. We are not writing a textbook on chemistry, but we are having fun to the best of our ability (which we sincerely wish for the respected reader), so those who are especially interested can apply for detailed information to any textbook of organic chemistry, even school. The benzene molecule is now depicted like this (the ring is one of the clouds that seems to hover above the plane of the page of our book).
Benzene is the best known representative of the so-called aromatic compounds, which (1) contain a ring or rings like benzene, (2) are relatively stable and (3) despite being unsaturated (the presence of pi bonds), they are prone to substitution reactions rather than addition. So says Zarathustra, that is, the encyclopedia! Actually, the aromatic system (if you believe the same source) is a special property of some chemical compounds, due to which the ring of unsaturated bonds exhibits abnormally high stability. The term "aromaticity" was coined because the first such substances discovered had a pleasant odor. Now this is not entirely true - many aromatic compounds smell quite disgusting.
Why do we need benzene, except, of course, purely human curiosity? I mean, what is it eaten with and is it eaten? But seriously, benzene is a toxic, colorless, flammable liquid, slightly soluble in water and difficult to decompose. It is used as an additive to motor fuels, in chemical synthesis, as an excellent solvent - sometimes it is called “organic water”, which can dissolve anything. That is why it is used to extract alkaloids from plants, fats from bones, meat and nuts, to dissolve rubber adhesives, rubber, and any other paints and varnishes.
The carcinogenicity of benzene to humans has been clearly established. In addition, it causes blood diseases and affects chromosomes. Symptoms of poisoning: irritation of the mucous membranes, dizziness, nausea, feeling of intoxication and euphoria (benzene toxicomania). Due to the low solubility of benzene in water, it can exist on its surface in the form of a gradually evaporating film. Consequences of short-term inhalation of concentrated benzene vapors: dizziness, convulsions, memory loss, death.
We found two references to benzene in Russian poetry. And, frankly, both of them disappointed us. Here young Boris Kornilov (1932) wrote the poems “ Family Council" Look, what an energetic beginning, what beautiful rhymes:
The night, covered with bright varnish,
looks into the upper room through the window.
There are men sitting on benches -
all dressed in cloth.
The oldest one, he's angry like a bitch
pressed by grief in the red corner -
hands washed with benzene,
they lie on his lap.
Feet as dry as logs
the face is striped with horror,
and the quick oil is smooth
freezes on the hair.
This is an evil fist with sons. For some reason, he really doesn’t like that the new government is going to take away all his property, and then shoot him or, at best, send him to Siberia with his family. Accordingly, the author portrays him as an operetta villain, flexing his poetic muscles and not worrying too much about the verisimilitude of the details. The young author (25 years old) for some reason thinks that cloth is a fabric for rich world-eaters who lubricate their hair with skorom (that is, an animal - probably butter). And they wash their hands with benzene - for the sake of a bright rhyme with “he is angry”, since it is clear that this substance has never been found in the village, and even chemists do not wash their hands with it - why on earth? But what can you not write for the sake of ideological consistency? Moreover, in terms of energy and imagery, these poems are not bad at all. This must be why the author was not favored for these poems, but was accused of “fierce kulak propaganda.” And then, of course, they shot me.
And the great Blok also upset us at first. Benzene for him is only a pleasure for drug addicts. Meanwhile, it can only be used for these purposes out of great desperation; it is a weak drug and terribly poisonous. And the poems are called “Comet”.
You threaten us with the last hour,
From blue eternity a star!
But our maidens are according to atlases
They bring silk to the world: yes!
But they wake up the night with the same voice -
Steel and smooth - trains!
All night they pour light into your villages
Berlin and London and Paris
And we don't know surprise
Following your path through the glass roofs,
Benzene brings healing,
Matchish is spreading to the stars!
Our world, with its peacock tail spread,
Like you, filled with a riot of dreams:
Through Simplon, seas, deserts,
Through the scarlet whirlwind of heavenly roses,
Through the night, through the darkness - from now on they strive
Flight of a flock of steel dragonflies!
Threaten, threaten over your head,
The stars are terribly beautiful!
Shut up angrily behind your back,
The monotonous crack of the propeller!
But death is not scary for a hero,
While the dream is running wild!
However, after a careful reading of this poem, the authors began to suspect that it was not written without irony, since the author contrasts the deadly power of the comet with some rather mundane and even vulgar achievements of humanity (“glass roofs,” embroidering girls, “trains,” “steel dragonflies" and so on). It is no coincidence that among all these signs of a well-fed and contented life, it suddenly turns out that our world “has spread out its tail like a peacock,” so that the “violence” of its “dreams” begins to sound rather doubtful. It is possible that benzene was inserted instead of opium in order to mock the hapless drug addict.
Of the interesting derivatives of our hero, we point out phenol, which in its chemical structure is benzene with an attached hydroxy group –OH. It was once called carbolic acid or simply carbolic acid, which in the form aqueous solution gives an excellent disinfectant liquid. For the first time, carbolic acid was used for disinfection by the English doctor Joseph Lister when dressing patients with complex fractures (in America, the Listerine mouthwash is still popular, although it no longer contains any carbolic acid). Until then, any complex wound was almost always complicated by infection, and with amputations of limbs, infection was almost inevitable. Appendicitis was considered fatal disease– now a simple operation to remove the appendix often ended in exitus letalis. The one-legged English pirate John Silver from Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel “Treasure Island” is a miracle of British medicine of the 18th century. In fact, during such operations, only one out of twenty patients survived well. Carbolic acid destroys the tissue around the wound, but also kills the bacteria in it, so Lister's patients recovered surprisingly quickly. Then Lister began spraying the operating room with this substance. Since then, a solution of carbolic acid has been used to disinfect premises, clothing and much more. In both the First and Second World Wars, carbolic acid was used quite widely in field surgery, mainly due to the lack of other, more advanced disinfectants. Today they prefer internal antiseptics– primarily sulfonamides and antibiotics. And we are left with “the roar of a carbolic guitar” - this is what Mandelstam wrote in 1935, recalling the strumming of a Hawaiian guitar, which the poet Kirsanov played behind the “cheap wall” of his “Moscow evil dwelling” (while it still existed).
Let us conclude this chapter by saying that in 1978 a compound was synthesized that could well be called “superbenzene.” It is a hydrocarbon consisting of 12 benzene rings fused together in the shape of a macrocyclic hexagon. At one of the chemical congresses, this substance was solemnly named “kekulen” - it is clear in honor of whom.
And if – let’s be honest! - we have a weakness for benzene for the sophistication of its structure, then kekulen is worthy of even more passionate love, no less than the fullerenes described in the chapter on carbon.
Dmitry Mendeleev saw his table in a dream, and his example is not the only one. Many scientists admitted that they owe their discoveries to their amazing dreams. From their dreams not only the periodic table, but also the atomic bomb came into our lives.
“There are no mysterious phenomena that cannot be understood,” said Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the great French scientist, philosopher, mathematician, physicist and physiologist. However, at least one inexplicable phenomenon was well known to him from personal experience. The author of many discoveries made during his life in various fields, Descartes did not hide the fact that the impetus for his versatile research was several prophetic dreams, seen by him at the age of twenty-three.
The date of one of these dreams is known precisely: November 10, 1619. It was that night that the main direction of all his future works was revealed to Rene Descartes. In that dream, he picked up a book written in Latin, on the very first page of which a secret question was written: “Which way should I go?” In response, according to Descartes, “The Spirit of Truth revealed to me in a dream the interconnection of all sciences”.
How this happened is now anyone's guess; only one thing is known for sure: the research that was inspired by his dreams brought Descartes fame, making him the greatest scientist of his time. For three centuries in a row, his work had a huge impact on science, and a number of his works on physics and mathematics remain relevant to this day.
Surprisingly, dreams famous people that prompted them to make discoveries is not so uncommon. An example of this is Niels Bohr's dream, which brought him the Nobel Prize.
Niels Bohr: visiting the atoms
The great Danish scientist, founder of atomic physics, Niels Bohr (1885-1962), while still a student, managed to make a discovery that changed the scientific picture of the world.
One day he dreamed that he was on the Sun - a shining clot of fire-breathing gas - and the planets were whistling past him. They revolved around the Sun and were connected to it by thin threads. Suddenly the gas solidified, the “sun” and “planets” shrank, and Bohr, by his own admission, woke up as if from a jolt: he realized that he had discovered the model of the atom that he had been looking for for so long. The “sun” from his dream was nothing more than a motionless core around which electron “planets” revolved!
Needless to say, the planetary model of the atom, seen by Niels Bohr in a dream, became the basis for all subsequent works of the scientist? She laid the foundation for atomic physics, bringing Niels Bohr the Nobel Prize and world recognition. The scientist himself, all his life, considered it his duty to fight against the use of the atom for military purposes: the genie, released by his dream, turned out to be not only powerful, but also dangerous...
However, this story is just one in a long series of many. Thus, the story about an equally amazing nocturnal insight that advanced world science forward belongs to another Nobel laureate, Austrian physiologist Otto Lewy (1873-1961).
Chemistry and life of Otto Lewy
Nerve impulses in the body are transmitted by an electric wave - this is what doctors mistakenly believed until the discovery made by Levi. While still a young scientist, for the first time he disagreed with his venerable colleagues, boldly suggesting that chemistry was involved in the transmission of nerve impulses. But who will listen to yesterday's student refuting scientific luminaries? Moreover, Levy’s theory, for all its logic, had practically no evidence.
It was only seventeen years later that Levi was finally able to carry out an experiment that clearly proved he was right. The idea for the experiment came to him unexpectedly - in a dream. With the pedantry of a true scientist, Levi spoke in detail about the insight that visited him for two nights in a row:
“...On the night before Easter Sunday 1920, I woke up and made a few notes on a piece of paper. Then I fell asleep again. In the morning I had the feeling that I had written down something very important that night, but I could not decipher my scribbles. Next night, at three o'clock, the idea came back to me again. This was the idea of an experiment that would help determine whether my hypothesis of chemical transmission was valid... I immediately got up, went to the laboratory and performed an experiment on a frog heart that I had seen in a dream... Its results became the basis for the theory of chemical transmission of nerve impulses "
Research, in which dreams made a significant contribution, brought Otto Lewy the Nobel Prize in 1936 for his services to the field of medicine and psychology.
Another famous chemist, Friedrich August Kekule, did not hesitate to publicly admit that it was thanks to a dream that he managed to discover the molecular structure of benzene, which he had previously struggled with for many years without success.
Kekule's snake ring
By Kekule’s own admission, for many years he tried to find the molecular structure of benzene, but all his knowledge and experience were powerless. The problem tormented the scientist so much that sometimes he did not stop thinking about it either at night or during the day. Often he dreamed that he had already made a discovery, but all these dreams invariably turned out to be just an ordinary reflection of his daily thoughts and worries.
This was the case until the cold night of 1865, when Kekule dozed off at home by the fireplace and had an amazing dream, which he later described as follows: “Atoms were jumping before my eyes, they merged into larger structures, similar to snakes. As if spellbound, I watched their dance, when suddenly one of the “snakes” grabbed its tail and danced teasingly before my eyes. As if pierced by lightning, I woke up: the structure of benzene is a closed ring!
This discovery was a revolution for chemistry at that time.
The dream struck Kekule so much that he told it to his fellow chemists at one of the scientific congresses and even urged them to be more attentive to their dreams. Of course, many scientists would subscribe to these words of Kekule, and first of all his colleague, the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, whose discovery, made in a dream, is widely known to everyone.
Indeed, everyone has heard that their periodic table chemical elements Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev “spied” in a dream. However, how exactly did this happen? One of his friends spoke about this in detail in his memoirs.
The whole truth about Dmitry Mendeleev
It turns out that Mendeleev's dream became widely known since light hand A.A. Inostrantsev, a contemporary and familiar scientist, who once came into his office and found him in the gloomiest state. As Inostrantsev later recalled, Mendeleev complained to him that “everything came together in my head, but I couldn’t express it in a table.” And later he explained that he worked without sleep for three days in a row, but all attempts to put his thoughts into a table were unsuccessful.
In the end, the scientist, extremely tired, went to bed. It was this dream that later went down in history. According to Mendeleev, everything happened like this: “in a dream I see a table where the elements are arranged as needed. I woke up and immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper - only in one place did a correction later turn out to be necessary.”
But the most intriguing thing is that at the time when Mendeleev dreamed of the periodic table, the atomic masses of many elements were established incorrectly, and many elements were not studied at all. In other words, starting only from the scientific data known to him, Mendeleev simply would not have been able to make his brilliant discovery! This means that in a dream he had more than just an insight. The discovery of the periodic table, for which scientists of that time simply did not have enough knowledge, can be easily compared to foreseeing the future.
All these numerous discoveries made by scientists during sleep make us wonder: either great people have revelation dreams more often than mere mortals, or they simply have the opportunity to realize them. Or maybe great minds simply don’t think much about what others will say about them, and therefore don’t hesitate to seriously listen to the clues of their dreams? The answer to this is the call of Friedrich Kekule, with which he concluded his speech at one of the scientific congresses: “Let us study our dreams, gentlemen, and then we may come to the truth!”.
