Learning together

People can learn together but go different ways
Go the same way but achieve different standings
Stand together but have different aspirations

Most young people learn no more than the orthodoxy of science. They acquire the establish doctrine, the dead letter. Some, at university, went on to study the beginnings of method. They practiced experimental proof in routine research. They discovered science’s uncertainties and its eternally provisional nature. That began to bring it to life. To become a scientist required a full initiation. Such an initiation came from close personal association with the intimate views and practice of a distinguished master. The practice of science was not itself a science, it was an art, to be passed from master to apprentice as the art of painting is passed or as the skills and traditions of the law or of medicine are passed. You could not learn the law from books and classes alone. You could not learn medicine. No more could you learn science, because nothing in science ever quite fits; no experiment is ever final proof; everything is simplified and approximate. Learning the feel of proof; learning judgment; learning which hunches to play; learning which stunning calculations to rework, which experimental results not to trust; these skills admitted you to the spectators’ benches at the chess game of the gods, and acquiring them required sitting first at t he feet of a master. If science has become the orthodoxy of the west, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part. But no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestioningly accepted. Becoming a scientist is necessarily an act of profound commitment to the scientific system and the scientific world view. Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements - and this is untrue. Belief is the oath of allegiance that scientists swear. Scientists have constituted a republic of educated believers taught through a chain of masters and apprentices to judge carefully the slippery edges of their work. Who then guides the work? Imagine a group of workers faced with the problem of assembling a very large, very complex jigsaw puzzle. How could they organize themselves to do the job most efficiently? Each worker could take some of the pieces from the pile and try to fit them together. That would be an efficient method if assembling a puzzle was like shelling peas. But it wasn’t. The pieces were not isolated. They fitted together into a whole. And the chance of any one worker’s collection of pieces fitting together was small. Even if the group made enough copies of the pieces to give every worker the entire puzzle to attack, no one would accomplish as much alone as the group might if it could contrive a way to work together. The best way to do the job, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing. When they work on putting the puzzle together in the sight of the others, every time a piece of it is fitted in by one worker, all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in consequence. That way even though each worker acts on his own initiative, he acts to further the entire group’s achievement. The group works independently together, the puzzle is assembled in the most efficient way. Science has no ultimate leaders. Consensus rules.
Extracted from:
Rhodes, R., The making of Atomic Bomb, Simon & Schuster, 1986