I came across this picture in a BBC story today, it is mind boggling and certainly up there with Earth rise and the hubble ultra-deep field as the most important photographs ever created. The scale of the picture is a single molecule and the picture shows a "pentacene" molecule which is 5 linked benzene rings. The incredible thing about this picture is that it clearly shows the bonds between the atoms of carbon & hydrogen, the other thing that struck me was how similar it was to the text book images of the same molecule, such images were first created over a century ago (1865) by chemists who could only "reason" about such shapes and had no way of ever hoping to actually see them.
The image below shows the text book version of the same thing.
What with all this talk of revealed and reasoned knowledge on the blog lately this discovery has a nice little story associated with it; the Chemist that discovered the structure of Benzene was a German called Friedrich August Kekulé who claimed to only have realised the truth after a dream in which he saw a snake eating it's own tail (hence the ring structure)
Oh those victorians, such romantics, who says scientists can't be dreamers too!
1 comment:
That's the only fact I remember from biology class -- him dreaming of the Benzine Ring.
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