A friend once asked the physicist Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe over the entrance to
his house, for luck, since it was an example of a superstition, and he
didn't believe in superstitions. “I have it there,” said Bohr,
“because I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.”
Bohr did pioneering work on the structure of the atom and also conceived the principle of complementarity, the idea that items could be analyzed separately as having several contradictory properties . . . that light, for example, could be both a wave and a stream of particles simultaneously.
This idea has obvious spiritual implications, as the anecdote above suggests.