The Science of Sleep: Five Discoveries Made by Sleeping Scientists.

Dmitry Mendeleyev

   Perhaps the most famous of the scientific dreams was the periodic table of elements, the dream chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev. This table, of course, was created not one year and not one scientist. In 1668, the first 15 chemical elements were named by the Irishman Robert Boyle, a hundred years later the list was brought to 35 Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier, and then Mendeleyev worked on it. He is credited with the following phrase: "I saw in my dream a table in which the elements were located as necessary. I woke up, immediately recorded the data on a piece of paper and fell asleep again. " It is difficult to say whether Mendeleev really said this. According to the testimony of his contemporaries, the chemist pored over the table for days without rest and could at some point "prikonyt". However, later Mendeleev took offense at the story with a dream: "I'm above it (the table), maybe for twenty years I thought, but you think: I was sitting and suddenly ... ready."

Niels Bohr

   One of the creators of modern physics, the Danish scientist Niels Bohr is known primarily for the quantum theory of the atom, which was based on the planetary model of the atom, quantum concepts and postulates proposed by him. Some researchers of the life of the famous theoretical physicist argue that the model of the atom Niels Bohr saw in a dream. "It was the sun from the burning gas around which the planets of the planet connected with it were rotating. Suddenly, the gas has hardened, and the sun and planets have drastically decreased in size, "the authors of biographical research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say.

Elias Hou

     Living in the XIX century, American Elias Hou is considered the "father" of a modern sewing machine. Although in fact, he simply improved the existing design of the unit and was the first in the United States to obtain a patent for a sewing machine with a shuttle mechanism (the so-called "locust" type stitch). As a result, the sewing machine Hou made straight seams with a speed of up to 300 stitches per minute, and journalists called his device "extraordinary." In the course of working on the typewriter, Howe was quite puzzled, where exactly in the mechanism there should be a needle eye. Judging by family history, the decision came to the inventor in a dream. "He almost reached the limit of his strength when he found out where the needle should be in the typewriter. He kept thinking about the classical needle, and the eye at the bottom of the needle just did not occur to him until he had a dream that he was creating a sewing machine for the king of savages in a strange country, "says the family archive. In a dream, the king of savages gave Hou 24 hours to solve the problem. From the nightmare of the inventor, the spears of the aborigines, who for some reason had holes in the tips, near the point itself, were rescued. At 4 o'clock in the morning, Hou woke up and made a dream come true.

Friedrich August Kekule

     German organic chemist of the century before last Friedrich August Kekule went down in history due to the fact that he applied the theory of valence to organic substances and found out the correct, cyclic formula of benzene. According to one version of historians, Friedrich Kekule represented in his imagination benzene in the form of a snake of six carbon atoms. The idea of cyclic connection came to him in a dream, when an imaginary snake bitten itself by the tail. According to another version, he also saw the connection of atoms in a molecule in a dream, returning home by bus.

Albert Einstein

    Albert Einstein said that his whole scientific career is a rethinking of the dream, which he saw as a teenager. In that dream, Einstein saw him riding a sleigh down a steep snow-covered slope, gathering speed at which all the surrounding colors merge into one spot. This dream inspired his whole career: he was thinking about what happens when the speed of light is reached, researchers note the scientist's life. Biographers are sure that the future author of the theory of relativity made many of his discoveries thanks to sleep. In confirmation, we can recall the well-known statement by Einstein: "The gift of seeing dreams meant more to me than my talent for acquiring conscious knowledge ... I spent a third of my life in a dream, and this third is by no means the worst." In 1992, American physicist Alan Lightman wrote about Einstein's dreams of the eponymous bestseller translated into more than 30 languages ​​of the world. According to the writer, it was in a dream that Einstein saw the paradoxes of the concept of space and time.