Delivered in a Daydream: 7 Great Achievements That Arose from a Wandering Mind [Slide Show]

Daydreaming and downtime can lead to solutions for difficult scientific problems and provide inspiration for creative works. Some of history's best-known scientific and literary achievements grew out of such mental meandering

Mental Blizzard Turkish novelist and 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk found inspiration from daydreams for works such as Snow (2004, Knopf). In a speech titled “the Implied Author” that Pamuk gave when he received the Puterbaugh literary prize in 2006 , Pamuk declared: "I long for inspiration to come to me (as poems did to Coleridge—and to Ka, Snow 's hero) in dramatic ways, preferably in scenes and situations that might sit well in a novel... Denis Barthel via Wikimedia Commons
Mind-Wandering Heights As children in the 1820s the novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, along with their brother, Branwell, created two make-believe realms called Gondal and Angria in their parsonage on the English Yorkshire moors... Mr. Absurd via Wikimedia Commons
Highway Hunch Mixing free-thinking into a recipe of science has led to modern-day revelations as well. One Friday night in 1983 Kary Mullis, then a chemist at Cetus Corp., was driving on California Highway 128 from Berkeley to Mendocino where he had a weekend cabin in the woods... Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons
Silver Lining? Around B.C. 200 the king of the Sicilian seaport city Syracuse posed a puzzle for the Greek mathematician Archimedes. The king had been given a crown that was supposed to be pure gold, but he suspected that the goldsmith had added some silver... Luestling via Wikimedia Commons
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Carbon Copies The daydream coalesced later into Kekulé's theory of molecular structure. It solved the problem of five carbons and 12 hydrogens in the following way, using the knowledge that each carbon atom can link to four other atoms in creating a compound... Pngbot via Wikimedia Commons
Atomic Tango August Kekulé von Stradonitz, who helped found structural organic chemistry in the mid-1800s, is known for a famous reverie that revealed the arrangement of atoms in a molecule. .. ArtMechanic via Wikimedia Commons
Explosive Insight Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard first considered the notion of converting mass into energy after he had read that his colleague Ernest Rutherford had discounted the possibility in a 1934 lecture... Panoptik via Wikimedia Commons
Relativity Revelation Albert Einstein's unleashed imagination was an important ingredient to his success. After months of intense mathematical exercises he homed in on the gist of his special theory of relativity while taking a break from his work "and let his imagination wander about the concepts of space and time," wrote Guenther Knoblich and Michael Oellinger in the October 2006 Scientific American MIND ... Hemulen via Wikimedia Commons
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