Gerald Holton

• 1. Introduction

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  Gerald Holton was 16 years old when he and his younger brother Edgar were granted places on the British Quakers' Kindertransport. It was 1938, and Austria had just been annexed by Germany. The nationwide pogrom of November 8-9 had removed any doubt about what the future held for Jewish families in Vienna.

  His parents, Emanuel and Regina, were Austrian professionals. Emanuel specialized in international law; Regina was a physiotherapist. The family had already fled Germany after fascism rose and after one physical attack on the young family. Now Vienna, where Holton had grown up attending the Humanistisches Gymnasium, was no longer safe.

  The Kindertransport took Holton and his brother to England. There, Holton studied at the School of Technology in Oxford. He received a Certificate of Electrical Engineering in June 1940. He then left for America with his rejoined family. This was just days before Churchill's directive would have required him to report for internment as a male adult German refugee.

  In America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's directive made Holton an official "Enemy Alien," a designation applied to all holders of German passports. Yet Harvard invited him to join their wartime Electric-Acoustic Laboratory, and he taught naval officers to use and repair radar equipment.

  After the war, he enrolled at Harvard as a graduate student. He earned his Ph.D. in 1947 for research on the structure of matter at high pressure. His supervisor was Professor Percy Williams Bridgman, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1946. Harvard asked Holton to stay on. He has remained there for more than 70 years.

  In 1981, Holton gave the tenth annual Jefferson Lecture. The National Endowment for the Humanities describes it as the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished achievement in the humanities. He was the first scientist chosen to give it.

  How does a teenager forced onto the Kindertransport in 1938 become the person the American federal government most wants to honor for humanistic achievement? The career that fills that gap spans experimental physics, science history, philosophy, editorial transformation, and biographical archives. It also produced a new vocabulary for understanding how scientists think.

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• 2. Physics and Pedagogy

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  Holton was tenured at Harvard in 1952 at the age of 30. For 30 years starting from his doctoral thesis, he ran a high-pressure physics laboratory. It specialized in the structure of liquids and supported a regular flow of research students.

  One of the courses he taught in the Physics Department was unusual. It presented physics as part of a cultural tapestry that included astronomy, chemistry, technology, history, and philosophy of science. The course became his first book, Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science, published by Addison-Wesley in 1952.

  The National Science Foundation later commissioned a national curriculum project built on the same approach. Holton led it with colleagues F. James Rutherford and Fletcher Watson. That project, called Harvard Project Physics, was eventually adapted in a number of foreign countries.

  Holton built his pedagogy around a passage from Alfred North Whitehead. 'In the conditions of modern life,' Whitehead had warned, 'the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.' His conviction about multicultural education was equally firm. He held that a liberal education was a moral imperative. It immunized, he believed, against what he called the seduction of narrowness.

  From 1976 to 1982, Holton was also a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served there as a founding faculty member of the Program on Science, Technology and Society.

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• 3. Reshaping Daedalus

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  In 1956, Holton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Academy asked him to take over as editor of Daedalus, a small annual volume it had been distributing to members. He accepted the position and held it from 1958 to 1961, before handing it to Stephen Graubard.

  In those three years, he transformed Daedalus. He turned it from an in-house annual into a publicly available quarterly publication. In his first issue, published in Winter 1958, he stated the purpose directly. The journal should, he wrote, 'give the intellectual community a strong voice of its own.' It would also 'lift each of us above our individual cell in the labyrinth of learning,' so as 'to see the entire structure.'

  Under Holton, Daedalus served as a form of adult education, with several issues addressing problems on the public-policy horizon. The fall 1960 issue took up arms control and disarmament. Spring 1964 focused on women in America. The fall and winter 1965 issues examined the situation of African Americans, with a foreword written by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Spring 1969 turned to the ethical aspects of experimentation with human subjects.

  In 1972, Holton founded a separate publication, the Newsletters of the Program on the Public Conceptions of Science. By 1976, it had been renamed Science, Technology, and Human Values.

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• 4. Einstein's Archive and Themata

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  Albert Einstein died on the 18th of April 1955. Holton's colleague in the Physics Department, Professor Philipp Frank, proposed organizing a memorial. Frank was a proponent of the American continuation of the Vienna Circle's philosophy of science. He suggested that Holton present the history of Einstein's achievements as part of the occasion.

  Holton accepted, then discovered a problem. Apart from Einstein's own essays, almost no solid scholarship on the topic yet existed. Frank recommended a visit to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein's correspondence and manuscripts were kept. They were still under the supervision of Helen Dukas, Einstein's long-time secretary, and the collection was largely unstudied.

  On and off over two years, Holton helped turn that haphazard collection into an archive usable by scholars. It is now known as the Albert Einstein Archives. While reading through the material, he began to see its historical value from the inside.

  One pattern he encountered kept repeating. In constructing his theories, Einstein drew again and again from guiding concepts that were neither verifiable nor falsifiable. These included the primacy of unity, invariance, formal rather than materialistic explanation, logical parsimony, symmetry, the continuum, causality, and completeness. Scientists who opposed Einstein, like those favoring acausality and uncertainty, held the contraries of these same concepts.

  Holton named this class of motivating concepts Themata, with the singular form Thema. He found comparable thematic sets at the core of scientific work across history, from antiquity through Johannes Kepler to Niels Bohr. His book Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought was published by Harvard University Press in 1973, with a revised edition in 1988.

  The concept also served as a direct rebuttal to Thomas Kuhn's idea of scientific paradigms. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued that paradigms pervade entire scientific communities. He held that all practitioners at a given time share the same guiding framework. Holton pointed to the famous mutual oppositions between Einstein, Schroedinger, and Heisenberg as evidence against this view. These were contemporaries; they did not share the same framework. Individual scientists hold distinct thematic sets, and those sets shift as their subjects advance over time.

  Holton's research on Einstein eventually helped launch what one scholar described as an academic industry analogous to the ones surrounding Newton and Darwin. A scholar in the field, Tetsu Hiroshige, wrote that someone had to take that 'first step.'

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• 5. Studies in Inclusivity

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  With Dr. Gerhard Sonnert, a sociologist of science, Holton launched a long-term research effort called Project Access. Its aim was to understand why women remained underrepresented and undervalued among working scientists in most fields.

  The project yielded two books from Rutgers University Press in 1995. The first was Who Succeeds in Science? The Gender Dimension. The second, Gender Differences in Science Careers: The Project Access Study, carried a foreword by Robert K. Merton.

  A second public issue drew Holton's attention: what immigrants contribute to American society. He and Sonnert undertook a several-years study they called Second Wave. Their subjects were immigrants who had come to the United States as children fleeing Nazi persecution. Using questionnaires and face-to-face interviews, they compared what these individuals had achieved against what American-born peers had achieved.

  The results appeared in What Happened to the Children Who Fled Nazi Persecution, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. Bernard Bailyn wrote the preface. A German translation, Was geschah mit den Kindern, followed from Lit Verlag in Muenster in 2008.

  Holton and Sonnert saw the findings as relevant to present-day immigration as well. They published a follow-up, Helping Young Refugees and Immigrants Succeed, with Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.

  Holton described this kind of research as Jeffersonian Research, named for Thomas Jefferson's double commitment to basic investigation and the practical needs of society. Essays calling for the wider adoption of this concept were made available through Harvard's Digital Access to Scholarship platform.

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