“Obviously, I saw in my dream a table in which the elements were arranged as needed. I woke up and immediately wrote down the data on a sheet of paper and fell asleep again … And only in one place was it then necessary to edit. " So - ostensibly or in fact - Dmitry Mendeleev talked about the way he discovered the periodic system of chemical elements to the professor of geology at St. Petersburg University Alexander Inostrantsev. And he, starting in 1919, retold this story to his colleagues and students. Was the discovery of the periodic table really made by the name of the river in co-authorship with the god of sleep and dreams Morpheus? Or - as some of our media write about it - is it not true, a common legend, a bike? Are there other discoveries and inventions in world history, already without any "but" and "if", made in a dream? Let's try to figure it out,incidentally returning the good name to the Petersburg geologist.
Solitaire game plus sleep, genius and ability to work
The latest article in the international newspaper The Epoch Times, which pays much attention to significant events in science and technology, categorically reports that Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev nevertheless made his discovery in a dream. At the same time, the author of the article, by the way, a certified chemist and doctor of historical sciences, refers to the book “Russian chemist B. М. Kedrova "On creativity in science and technology" ", which allegedly cites Mendeleev's words to Alexander Inostrantsev.
After reading these revelations, we were immediately alert. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, Bonifatii Mikhailovich Kedrov, a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, is more correctly called a Soviet scientist, because his activity fell on the years of Soviet power, and he died in 1985. Secondly, we have doubts about how correctly this work was translated into English. Anyway: did the author of The Epoch Times read the original source to which he refers? In turn, we were not too lazy to take the book "On Creativity in Science and Technology (Popular Science Essays for Youth)" (Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1987) - and carefully study it.
Let us immediately note that there is no quotation in Kedrov's book to which the respected author of the aforementioned international publication refers. Moreover, Bonifatiy Mikhailovich literally writes the following: “After the appearance of A. Inostrantsev's story, a version spread that D. Mendeleev made his discovery in a dream. This absurdity has now been completely refuted."
So, are the domestic media right, and not the Western author, who did not even take the trouble to look into the original source? Let's not rush. Running a little ahead, we note: in science, as in all other branches of human knowledge, in details, contrary to the proverb, lies not the devil, but the truth. So that's it. A full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Kedrov opposes the vulgarization of Mendeleev's creative method, and otherwise - after conducting his own investigation in the archives of Dmitry Ivanovich - actually confirms the words cited from memory by Alexander Inostrantsev.
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Let's take a closer look at the specified nuance
Let us recall how Mendeleev's complete statement sounds in Inostrantsev's presentation, highlighting in it the part that they like to abbreviate so much: "Obviously, I saw in a dream a table in which the elements were arranged as needed." Now let's read it from B. M. Kedrova: “M. Mendeleeva-Kuzmina gave me all the handwritten tables of her father that she had preserved in the museum-archive. And one of them exactly corresponded to what A. Inostrantsev was saying: in it the elements were arranged "as they should", that is, not in decreasing order of atomic weights, but in increasing order, firstly. And secondly, when it was published, D. Mendeleev made a correction only in one place, deleting the two elements he had erroneously predicted ("? = 8;? = 22") between hydrogen and copper … <… In a dream, Dmitry Ivanovich only "rewrote" his completed table in reverse order."
Now, as it seems, we have dotted all the i's. Simplifying a little, we can state: the venerable Petersburg professor Inostrantsev did not lie - in the final (we emphasize this word) form, Dmitry Ivanovich saw the table in a dream. Along the way, emphasizing that from Kedrov's book you can learn a lot of other interesting things about Mendeleev's creative laboratory - for example, about the great contribution made to the development of the table by the scientist's addiction to play solitaire (Academician Alexander Fersman will once call the periodic table "chemical solitaire"), - let's go to other discoveries and inventions made in a dream. And also to those popularizers of science who - excuse me - only dreamed that these discoveries were made by scientists, they say, when they took Morpheus as a co-author.
At the speed of light, Einstein raced in dreams on a sleigh
Do you know, dear reader, that Albert Einstein did not develop his own formulation of the principle of "constancy of the speed of light", but simply saw him in a dream? And I personally experienced the speed of light itself. Do not know? So the author of these lines for the time being did not guess about this "fact".
Meanwhile, in the West, dozens of popularizers of science write as a fact about the decisive contribution to this discovery of "recurring sleep". In a word, Morpheus allegedly almost compelled Albert - he sent him the same dream until he gave up and, in an angry sleep, wrote the following passage on a piece of paper: “Each ray of light moves in a“resting”coordinate system with a certain speed V, regardless of whether this ray of light is emitted by a resting or moving body."
Isn't it curious what kind of dream it was and who first mentioned it?
So, we begin another investigation, diving headlong into the archives. And with surprise we find out: the author - in this case, really stories and popular legend - was the "Reverend" John Price, who announced the "sleep speed of light theory" in a dialogue with John Ainhard, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering and history at the University of Houston. It was Price who first announced the obsessive dream that allegedly tormented Albert since his youth: how he "rushes in a sleigh down the snowy slope, approaching the speed of light, at which all colors are mixed into one."
Correct the author of these lines if he is wrong, but in none of the entries made by Einstein personally there was no mention of the speed of light in relation to a dream about a sleigh and a "snowy slope". Forgive the "Reverend" John his story, given the poetic way of thinking of the preacher, as well as the fact that "Einstein's dream" was mentioned by him … during a radio program called "Engines of our ingenuity" (far from scientific canons).
But what about the Western "gradual" popularizers of science, who many times turned this myth into a supposedly "reliable fact"?
And I noticed the warrior of the king, pointing a spear at my head …
However, there are enough revelations for today. Now let us list briefly the facts of inventions and discoveries made in a dream. Note that it is very easy to distinguish such facts from myths. While the latter are created from someone else's words, the former are written by the pioneers of science and technology themselves: in diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, etc.
For example, in the title of this chapter, we have taken the plot of the dream of the American scientist Elias Howe, who was working on improving the sewing machine. More precisely, over a machine using a lock stitch (shuttle), for which he received US patent No. 4750 on September 10, 1846. Subsequently, Howe himself wrote that a dream about a formidable king and his guards, ready to punish Elias for his failure, helped him to achieve the correct location of the needle and its ear. It was enough to look at the point of the spear of the soldier who accompanied him to the scaffold, as well as at the hole pierced by the weapon in the head of the unfortunate man.
Now - a mystery to the readers. After reading the following description of a dream, try to imagine what Morpheus made by the German chemist Friedrich August Kekule in 1865. So: “Atoms jumped before my eyes, they merged into larger structures similar to snakes. As if enchanted, I followed their dance, and suddenly one of the "snakes" grabbed her tail and danced teasingly in front of my eyes …"
What kind of organic chemical compound are you talking about? We read the answer, again, from Herr Kekule: "As if pierced by lightning, I woke up: the structure of benzene is a closed ring!"
In this case, it doesn't even matter to us that the organic chemist Kekule - by the way, a foreign corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences - effectively fell asleep not in his “favorite armchair by the fireplace,” as it is customary to write about it, but, according to his notes, in an omnibus. The main thing is that the fact of the discovery made in a dream is confirmed first-hand.
Let us note in conclusion: the history of science knows many discoveries made by scientists in a dream. Really so numerous that there is simply no point in inventing new and conjecturing well-known facts. After all, the dreams of geniuses sometimes turned out to be much more amazing than later some fictional ones attributed to them. There is one example of this: even if Albert Einstein did not roll in his sleep from the snowy mountains, but in 1913 Niels Bohr visited the Sun in his dream … on the Sun, seeing the planets rotating at a tremendous speed in front of him. So it would probably be fair if Morpheus himself shared the Nobel Prize for the creation of the planetary model of the atom. *
Konstantin Burtsev