Kekulé, the Benzene Ring, and the Akashic Records
Kekulé, who was Belgian or French, I can never keep it straight, got hooked on this problem. He'd stay at the lab until late, catch the final tram back, eat a big meal, and then nod off by his fire. And in those flames he started seeing things. This is all recorded in the literature on creativity, by the way. Search for how Kekulé discovered the benzene ring and the account is there for anyone to read. What he saw were furry little balls tumbling around in the fire. Remember the setting: no television, no Internet, nobody has a phone. So the images held his attention, and he came to anticipate them.
As the nights went on, the furry balls grew in number. Now and then two of them would knock together, and once in a while, a collision made them stick. Gradually they formed chains. Here's a detail worth sitting with: a tennis ball is also a furry ball, but on a tennis ball every bit of fuzz is cut to the same length. The balls Kekulé watched had blurred, undefined edges that faded out into nothing.
One evening the chains in the fire were unusually lively. They started playing crack the whip. The free end of one chain whipped around, struck its own other end, and locked shut. In that instant he understood it, and he counted the balls: one, two, three, four, five, six. He grasped that benzene was an aromatic ring, six carbon atoms arranged in a closed loop, each carbon carrying two hydrogens.
Put an atom under a microscope capable of showing it and you get something close to what Kekulé was watching. The nucleus sits in one spot, but an electron tied to that nucleus can be far off, feet away, meters even, traveling a path that eventually swings it back around. Atoms carry no sharp outline. What surrounds them is a thick haze of electrons. My read is that Kekulé was looking at atoms as they actually appear, if appearance is even the right word.
And where was he seeing them? In the Akashic records. Think about the circumstances again. He's spent, the workday behind him, the meal finished, stretched out and half-asleep in the warmth of the fire. Which brainwaves is he producing at that point? Theta, obviously. Theta plus a burning want to know the answer is what opened the door for him. So I'd file this alongside other cases where a serious scientific breakthrough came from a person reaching the Akashic records by switching on theta.