That Rocks and Minerals book I loved so much as a kid was from 1957. The Polya book I just read was from 1953. So many of the best Inklings works were from about then too. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles were written from 1950-57. The integrated circuit, to which I owe my career, was first successfully built in 1958. I could go on and on.
The 1950s were a pretty damn cool time for science and productivity, but they grew OUT of an earlier age which was then abandoned – their own children (the boomer generation) grew largely into philosophical and spiritual mushiness. What went wrong? Somehow, our parenting and catechism went to pot while we were paying attention to something else, or paying a lot of money for something else. We built a rocket to the moon, but our society was running on fumes. Now the gas is all gone. Our generation has to dig up all the treasure again. So many of the jewels got mistakenly taken out with the trash. The ancient texts and traditions are our landfill. Time to raise a golden city from the garbage.