“You have pointed out,” Oppenheimer wrote him, “that you are afraid your position in the laboratory might make it necessary for you to engage in prolonged argument and discussion in order to obtain agreement upon which the progress of the work would depend. Nothing that I can put in writing can eliminate this necessity.” The scientists had to be free to argue—and Oppenheimer would arbitrate disputes only for the purpose of reaching some kind of collegial consensus. “I am not arguing that the laboratory should be so constituted,” he told Parsons. “It is in fact so constituted.”
