There is a great article in the Guardian about this (from October 2023) which explains why, and which cites some of Harry's early work on TEA lasers. Here's the relevant extract:
Original article (no paywall) here.What’s fascinating about all this is how much of it comes down, not to finance or technology, but to people and what they know. [This] reminded me of a striking piece of research conducted decades ago by the philosopher of science Harry Collins when he was a PhD student. Collins was interested in how knowledge gets transferred and intrigued by a particular piece of technology, the TEA laser. This was a device that was comprehensively documented in the physics literature but which research laboratories were unable to replicate. What Collins discovered was that “nobody could make the laser work if they hadn’t spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn’t lase.”
What people didn’t understand, he realised, “was that the inductance of the leads was important… If you were working from just a circuit diagram, you naturally put this big heavy thing on the bench, and the lead from the capacitor to the top electrode would be too long and have too high an inductance for the laser to work. That is the kind of thing that is involved in the transfer of tacit knowledge.”
It is. It’s the kind of knowledge that is never written down and yet can be crucial, even in the highest of hi-tech enterprises. And you won’t find it in ChatGPT, either.