Week 2 Seminar: The knowledge that isn't written

Polanyi, and Collins' TEA laser: nobody built one from the published papers, it took contact with a lab where one already worked.

1 March 2027

Open the slides

The case, or the argument#

In the early 1960s, several physics labs tried to build a TEA laser from the published literature alone. The papers were not wrong, not incomplete in any way a referee would have flagged, and not withheld. Harry Collins, studying the attempts, found that success correlated with one thing: contact, direct or one step removed, with a lab that already had a working laser. Papers travelled freely. The ability to build the thing they described did not.

This is the sharpest version of tacit knowledge the course will use: not a capability that was lost, but one that was never on the record to begin with. There is no rupture point in this week’s diagram, because nothing here ever broke — the record track and the capability track were simply never the same track, and week 1’s distinction is the reason that sentence is coherent instead of confusing.

What we do in the seminar#

Pick a skill you have that you could not fully hand to a stranger in writing — tying a specific knot, a debugging habit, a way of reading a room. Try to write instructions for it in five minutes. Compare what’s missing against what Collins found missing from the laser papers.

One reading#

Collins (1974) — read the laser case at full length before the seminar; the paper’s argument is broader than the one case, and this week only uses the narrow version of it.

A question left open#

If some knowledge is tacit by its nature — never fully write-downable — is “we should have documented it better” ever a complete answer to a lost capability? Keep this open; week 4 gives you a case to test it against.