> hopes that part of his scientific legacy will be the practice of adversarial collaboration...

This might seem like something new to those looking in the lab window from the outside, but to have no dissonance between views among scientific collaborators would be incredibly rare.  If there was a substantial consensus, the matter would not be the subject of research at all, it would be fodder for the textbook writers.  Most teams include widely divergent views. I had to break up a few actual knock-down, drag-out fistfights at Bell Labs Greensboro Works during my tenure there over differences that I had to read up on to fully grasp.  Good news - most lab rats are not also gym rats, so little harm done.

One of the most extreme examples was the hydrogen bomb - Werner Heisenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, and others  were unsure if exploding a single hydrogen bomb might combine all the hydrogen in Earth's water into helium nuclei, as happens constantly on the Sun.  Despite the possibility of an "End-Of-The-World" outcome from a single nuclear explosion, the team continued to work on the bomb.

Eventually, Arthur Compton did the math proving that the energy transfer (dissipation, really) from electrons to light quanta by "Scattering" alone made any chain reaction in air impossible.  So the "chain reaction" would be limited to the fissile materials contained in the munition itself.  His reward was that "Compton Scattering" was named after him.  

Compton's further work on that same set of equations eventually showed that  high-energy photons, like X-rays, after colliding with something, transfer part of that energy to a single electron -- supporting Einstein's "particle theory" of light, which earned Compton a Nobel.  

The only person to ever comment on how insane it was to continue to work on something that might kill all life on Earth was Kurt Vonnegut. Read the "Ice-Nine" story from his book "Cat's Cradle".  The punchline here is that Vonnegut submitted "Cat's Cradle" to U Chicago in the 1970s, which had rejected his master's thesis in the 1940s, and at long last earned his Master's of Arts.  Many think that this was a disservice, as a degree in physics should have been bestowed instead of, or in addition to the MA.

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