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by dekhn10 hours ago |
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upvoteby gilleain9 hours ago|
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Sodium-ammonium tartrate (I remembered what you were talking about, but had to look up the actual chemical!)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9291139/

From that:

"To his surprise, he noticed that each crystal has a tiny facet on one of its edges oriented sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. He could separate them by hand with a tweezer."

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upvoteby dekhn9 hours ago|
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It's moments like that, and Kekule's story of the snake dream for benzene that make me feel unworthy of being a scientist. I sometimes wonder: in my career of looking at things, did I miss something fundamental and significant simply because my powers of observation and general intelligence were insufficient?
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upvoteby jballanc5 hours ago|
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If you think Kekule's story is wild, you should read about how Kary Mullis came up with the idea for the polymerase chain reaction!
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upvoteby dekhn5 hours ago|
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I already have :) don't forget he also dropped acid in Golden Gate Park and then wrote a Nature paper about time reversal!
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upvoteby f1shy5 hours ago|
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He was on drugs. Right?
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upvoteby JKCalhoun4 hours ago|
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I assumed opium.

But I think if you are in the throes of a problem, pondering it constantly, day and night—it is in these times that an insight will make its way to your consciousness (drugs or otherwise).

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upvoteby jballanc3 hours ago|
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In graduate school he had a reputation for being the best at synthesizing LSD.
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upvoteby gilleain8 hours ago|
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Well, I don't know that every scientist has to have poetic dreams about snakes (Kekule) or apples (Newton).

Weirdly I often have dreams where I am 'solving' some problem, however on waking I realise the details are nonsense - not just the solution, but the problem itself. I think dreams are often a way to just exercise and sort memories and ideas. There is no reasoning involved.

A lot of science is just process, or multiple careful experimentation. Preparing for getting lucky is another matter.

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upvoteby dekhn8 hours ago|
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When I first learned about recursion I could not understand it (specifically, I didn't understand how eventually you reached a termination point and popped back up the stack). I spent all day thinking and thinking and thinking. As I was falling asleep- in that sort of lucid awake-but-not-awake state, the entire program I wanted to write appeared before me in glowing letters. Some deep part of my brain woke me up, I wrote the program down, and went back to sleep.

When I woke up the next day, I compiled it, ran it, and it worked on the first try (up to the stack limit on my computer... 6 function calls deep).

Since then I've noticed that if I get super-duper obsessive about things I don't understand, insights will start to pop into my head, but at the same time, I can't really talk to other people because the human interaction part of my brain is "paged out". I kind of understand tormented geniuses better knowing that many of them also walk a fine line between human life and discovery.

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upvoteby jibalt5 hours ago|
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Newton didn't dream of the apple falling, it actually happened (as such things do) but it didn't hit him on the head.

https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/OTH...

> after dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some appletrees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. "why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground," thought he to him self: occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood: "why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple."

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upvoteby sebmellen3 hours ago|
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This is such quaint, clear, and beautiful writing. It deeply struck me. Thank you for posting it.
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upvoteby matsemann7 hours ago|
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Btw, all this is explained in the "popular information" tab on the Nobel page. Always very interesting and easy to follow:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2026/popular-inf...

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upvoteby kiddico5 hours ago|
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The paths we all take to the same knowledge is hilarious to me. I learned about chirality in my mid twenties while playing mass effect lol
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upvoteby kccqzy7 hours ago|
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For me as early as high school it was easy to understand the concept of molecules having 3D structure (the standard textbook explanation of left glove versus right glove is easy), but it was really difficult for me to visualize it. I was not and am still not a visual thinker. This caused me a lot of problems when I needed to distinguish between enantiomers. For example I had a great deal of trouble when given two molecules that only differ in chirality, which one is levo and which is dextro, despite studying very hard.
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upvoteby dekhn7 hours ago|
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At least for me (because I have aphantasia) I found that using molecular visualization apps (ideally with 3D stereo glasses) makes a huge difference. I can sort of rotate the molecules around and build up a working mental picture that way.
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upvoteby kridsdale34 hours ago|
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It was a 100 level O-Chem lesson for me: We had the physical ball-and-stick models.
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upvoteby vondur7 hours ago|
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Enantiomers and Diastereomers are one of the more interesting and challenging things in Organic Chemistry. It also makes carbohydrate chemistry challenging in Biochem.
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