Humanities & Classics 1002
|
|
Renaissance Forum
Humanities & Classics 1002 |
    |
|
The discovery of benzene's structure is usually told as taking place in a dream rather than a flash of insight, as shown in the two slightly different accounts below (strange how two different versions get started). The version I heard
took place by the fireplace.
Version 1 (as allegedly told by Friedrich August von Kekule)
I turned my chair to the fire [after having worked on the problem for some time] and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller
groups kept modestly to the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by
repeated vision of this kind, could not 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 a flash of lighting I awoke... Let us learn to dream, gentlemen.
Version 2
Chemistry is a field with a long history of modeling and graphical representation. Nearly every student
of Organic Chemistry learns the story of August Kekulé, who was puzzling over why carbon, of all atoms, could form so many compounds. According to his own account [1], one summer evening in 1854, he dozed off while riding on an omnibus. In his dream, he saw myriads of atoms ``whirling in a giddy dance'' before his eyes, forming ever longer chains. This was the beginning of a series of visions
that would eventually lead him to the discovery of the structure of Benzene and other landmark principles of Organic Chemistry. Molecules by their nature are complex moving geometrical objects unseen to the naked eye. Because this microscopic world eludes our direct experience, models offer a visual language of sorts, which allows us to formulate questions, make statements and, in general,
communicate.