Take August Kekule von Stradonitz, the German organic chemist who discovered the structure of benzene. Once, late at night, he was sitting, staring into the fire. It was an old-fashioned wood fire so there were flames licking around in all directions. As he gazed, they started to look like snakes in his imagination. The more he gazed into the fire in this sleepy, relaxed kind of way, the more they began to look like snakes that were biting their own tails. And as he sat there, half-asleep, it suddenly occurred to him that the snake biting its own tail was a ring—and that so too was the
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