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[Phys-L] Re: Eureka!



Unfortunately the stories are usually after the event, so it is difficult to
discover how true they are. And let us not forget that authors make up or
embroider to make a better story. Sometimes dreams can bring to the surface
ideas, but sometimes dreams can be made up.

There are some others:
The sewing machine needle was reputedly invented after the inventor had a
dream about natives brandishing spears with holes in the points.

The poet Shelly claimed that he created the poem Kublai Khan after dreaming
a long poem and only writing down a fragment. This is probably a literary
conceit, because it is actually quite finished.

The best story about discovery in dreams I know is how a lady was convinced
she had solved the world's problems so she wrote it down. Next day she
found:
Higamus pigamus
All men are polygamous.
Higamus hogamus
All women monogamous.

Seriously, there is a problem with the way our brains work that could be
helped by dreams. The silent right half of the brain can have an insight,
but it can't easily cross to the speaking left half because there is only a
small connection between them. It takes time for this communication. Part
of that time could happen during the night.

Now let us remember that Voltaire wrote down what was reputedly told to him,
which is actually hearsay. Actually I think it is more likely that the
falling apple just brought his thoughts back to a problem he had been
wrestling with and had already solved, rather than being the crucial
observation. I was also under the impression that Hooke may have provided
the suggestion that it was an inverse square law, but Newton would never
acknowledge this.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX



OK, some of galileo's work was gedanken *, but are we not to believe
Voltaire and Newton's niece?


""One day in the year 1666 Newton had gone to the country, and seeing
the fall of an apple, as his niece told me, let himself be led into a
deep meditation on the cause which thus draws every object along a line
whose extension would pass almost through the center of the earth.'

Voltaire (1738)" quoted in Gravitation ** p.3

* http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/16/2/2


** appropriately weighs 5.8 #, the paper back ed.!


bc

A misquote? When Kekulè recounted his dream to his colleagues at a
scientific convention in 1890, he concluded with the remarks "Let us
learn to dream gentlemen and then we may perhaps find the truth."


Fakhruddin, Hasan wrote:

Thanks Scott for the URL of the very informative site in this regard.
So, indeed his Eureka was not for the discovery of buoyancy....probably
that came later. This story probably belongs to the same category as
- Newton discovery of gravity from the apple incident
- Galileo's experiment with large and small balls from the top of the

Tower of Pisa
- Kelkule discovering ring structure of benzene molecule from his
dream
of a snake biting its own tail
- others???

~Hasan Fakhruddin
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