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."

▲

matsemann 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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...

▲

dekhn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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?

▲

gilleain an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	dekhn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.