"One of the most prominent visitors of the World's Fair was the Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth. Asked by a reporter about his experience in space, his response made headlines. "Sometimes people are saying that God is out there," Titov said. "I was looking around attentively all day but I didn't find anybody there. I saw neither angels nor God.""
"This was, of course, a way for Titov to promote his government's official atheist position inside America-a little jab at the Soviet Union's primitively religious Cold War foe. But it was of a piece with a very common viewpoint, Eastern and Western, then and now: If you don't observe something and can't physically find it, then it is fair to assume it doesn't exist."
"It might strike you as unscientific to believe in the unseen, but the truth is the opposite: A good deal of the way today's scientists understand the world operates at a purely theoretical level. Take modern physics: For many decades, particle physicists have studied the building blocks of matter-the atoms that make up molecules; the protons and neutrons inside atoms; the quarks that make up protons and neutrons."
Grew up in Seattle in the 1970s when the city’s main landmark was the Space Needle, built for the 1962 World's Fair with the theme "Living in the Space Age." Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov said he looked around in space and "didn't find anybody there," a remark tied to Soviet atheist policy and used as a Cold War jab. A common viewpoint asserts that if something cannot be observed physically it likely does not exist. That viewpoint is characterized as foolish because life is incomplete without belief in the unseen. Modern science frequently depends on theoretical, unobservable constructs such as atoms, protons, neutrons, and quarks.
Read at The Atlantic
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