Comment by madaxe_again

That, but farther up the chain a generation of physicists was inspired by Escape From the Forbidden Planet, or on 1950s pulps reading about death rays and nuclear space battleships. Life imitates art, imitates life.

It’s just so hard to convey the sheer overwhelming size and complexity of it all - the feeling must have been akin to a mediaeval peasant who has lived their life in a thatched hut seeing a cathedral for the first time. Numinous.