312 ORGANIZED SCIENCE 



viduals is a sort of super-personal group intelligence, which is able 

 to discover answers that a single individual could never find. 



A uniform acknowledgment of one cultural tradition ensures the 

 coherence of scientific endea\'or, but its super-personal power de- 

 rives from the diversittj of individual capacities, skills, temperaments, 

 and commitments. Kepler thought that: 



The roads that lead men to knowledge are as wondrous as that knowl- 

 edge itself. 



Science achieves its maximum development only when there are as 

 many different kinds of scientists as there are different kinds of roads 

 to be explored. 



Complementarity of capacities. Scientific organization, Darwin 

 notes, alone makes possible the vital services rendered, by the host 

 of the comparatively mediocre, to the few men of genius whose 

 achievements give meaning to the work of all the rest. Newton said 

 he saw further because he could stand on the shoulders of giants— 

 which they were, though beside him they seem to us pygmies. Just 

 so, there is no Lavoisier without an antecedent Hales, no Einstein 

 without an antecedent Mach. We write the history of science in terms 

 of its great men, but lesser lights prepare the way for the great, whose 

 work they also complete. Thus, to consolidate the deep but lightly 

 held breakthrough initially made by the strategic insight of genius, 

 we need multiple small enveloping operations carried through with 

 the methodical skills of tacticians. 



The sickly Pascal's insightful contribution to the establishment of 

 Torricelli's aerostatic theory was the dispatch of a Perier, sound of 

 wind and limb, to carry a barometer up the Puy de Dome. That ex- 

 periment completed, one might still wish to confirm Perier 's results 

 by carrying other barometers up other mountains. One might want 

 also to venture up higher mountains, to see if the diminution in pres- 

 sure continues— and perhaps up mountains closer to the equator or 

 to the poles, to see if the effect varies with geographic position. Cer- 

 tainly one would want to improve the precision of the measurements, 

 in order to investigate in detail the functional dependence of pres- 

 sure on altitude. And so on. This work completes Torricelli's con- 

 ceptual system, but the role of imagination ever contracts, and the 

 character of those attracted to such work changes. Yet even the 



