The most memorable achievement of 19th Century chemist August Kekule was discovering the shape of the benzene molecule, a six-membered ring of carbon atoms.
What’s memorable about the discovery to non-chemists is how he claimed to have made it: it came to him in a dream about the mythic ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail.
Kekule’s dream is often cited as an example of how we shouldn’t care where a scientific hypothesis comes from. Any new idea is worth testing.
Read more on psychologytoday.com