For thousands of years humans were oppressed — as some of us still are — by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a go...

For thousands of years humans were oppressed — as some of us still are — by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then, 2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia - on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the islands and inlets of the busy eastern Aegean Sea.* Suddenly there were people who believed that everything was made of atoms; that human beings and other animals had sprung from simpler forms; that diseases were not caused by demons or the gods; that the Earth was only a planet going around the Sun. And that the stars were very far away.

Carl Sagan in Cosmos
Submitted by Catalin Popescu
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