Every great technological achievement has been a team effort. The Manhattan Project is a shining example of how you can compress into a few years what otherwise

Every great technological achievement has been a team effort. The Manhattan Project is a shining example of how you can compress into a few years what otherwise takes decades because scientists and technologists are not making a team effort. None of them alone could have done it or would have made significant progress. If you had left Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Feynman, Bethe, Szilard, Einstein, Wigner, von Neumann and at least two dozen others alone at separate universities around the states, there would not have been an atomic bomb. They needed each other to bounce ideas off, to feed each other related partial results, to correct mistakes. If you're making an intellectual effort and none of your colleagues have relevant input on (intermediate) results, then either your colleagues are extremely mediocre or you are blind to their contributions. In either case: you could probably produce better results with input from others.