Harry Collins

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The mistake I kept making was trusting the output because it sounded right.

Not once. Not in some dramatic failure that forced a reckoning. Dozens of times, in the quiet accumulation of moments where Claude produced something fluent, structured, confident — and I moved on. The Deleuze fabrication I describe in Chapter 7 was the one I caught. The question that has haunted me since is how many I didn't.

Harry Collins has spent fifty years studying exactly this problem, long before any language model existed. He embedded himself in communities of gravitational wave physicists, laser builders, practitioners whose expertise lived not in what they published but in what they knew how to do together. And he found something that upends the way most of us think about