Intuition and the Creation of a Better World
Intuition Magazine
We honour the role of intuitive creative inspiration in literature, art and music, but tend to pay little attention to the fact that in many scientific breakthroughs, something quite unlike rational thought was involved.
For instance: The Periodic Table of Elements, which hangs in Chemistry classrooms throughout the world was revealed to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in a dream after he had struggled for months to find a way to catergorise the elements.
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, attributed his experiences of sudden illumination to a "conquering force within".
Nicola Tesla said this of his insight that became the basis for the alternating รท current electrical system: "The idea came like a flash of lightning, and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers."
Albert Einstein described his theories as the "free invention of the imagination", not the result of scientific logic.
Intuition Magazine, December 1995
