Notes on Gerald Holton

For the last decade, my time has been dominated by science policy and family, but I recently had the opportunity to take an extended dip back into the history and historiography of science as the staff coordinator here at the American Institute of Physics for a panel of external experts advising on the strategic direction of our Center for History of Physics (CHP) and Niels Bohr Library & Archives. To brief the panel, I did some background research into the history of these programs, going all the way back to their origins with an ad hoc committee AIP convened, chaired by Harvard University physicist and historian Gerald Holton.

Established in 1960, the Holton Committee resulted in AIP supporting a multi-year project to identify source material concerning the history of “recent physics,” led first by a physicist-historian from the Smithsonian named W. James King, and then, from 1964, Charles Weiner. The Holton Committee became an advisory committee for that effort, which, when it concluded in 1965, became the basis for CHP, with Weiner serving as director.

Notably, the AIP “recent physics” project proceeded in parallel with a similar, better-known project called “Sources in the History of Quantum Physics,” led by Thomas Kuhn, with John Heilbron, Paul Forman, and Lini Allen as staff members. The National Science Foundation funded both projects, and AIP was also involved in the “quantum physics” project as administrator of its NSF grant. What is especially notable to me is that both projects were aimed at systematically establishing a broad foundation for future scholarship rather than producing a particular output.

The AIP advisory panel I was working with has since concluded its work, but in my not-so-copious spare time I have continued to poke around in some of the research and commentary surrounding science in the U.S. in the 1960s, and particularly its frequent ambition to apply a systematic approach. This effort has also been motivated by a pair of posts I wrote here in 2012 on Robert Merton’s unsuccessful efforts in that period to build a data-rich sociology of science around Charles Gillispie’s Dictionary of Scientific Biography project and the nascent citation indexing movement led by Eugene Garfield.

My broad impression is that the NSF-funded history projects, DSB, citation indexing, and Merton’s dashed aspirations were part of a loosely coherent movement in the 1960s to “get a handle on science,” for lack of a more precise description. And Holton’s name appears with great frequency, so the purpose of this post is to do a quick survey of some of his activities in this period.

A little biographical background on Holton (who is turning 101 this week):

Holton’s parents were Jewish Austrians who were living in Germany during the 1930s, and he and his family fled to the U.S. following the Anschluss. He received a PhD in physics from Harvard in 1947 working under physicist and philosopher Percy Bridgman and then remained on for the rest of his career as a member of the university’s faculty. Holton has reflected in a couple of different places (including in this oral history held by AIP) on how, through the influence of people like Bridgman and physicist Edwin Kemble, he became enmeshed in Harvard’s General Education program for undergraduates, which encouraged the amalgamation of science, history, and philosophy. In 1956, he also became the editor for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in that position set a strategic direction for its then-new humanistic journal Daedalus.

Following the death of Albert Einstein in 1955, Holton became one of the first scholars (maybe even the first scholar?) to study his papers, which gave him an appreciation of the tacit principles underlying Einstein’s scientific strategies as well as how investigations can reveal ways that scientific work often diverges from the received stories about it. Those insights informed his article, “On the Origins of the Special Theory of Relativity,” published in 1960 in the American Journal of Physics, the journal of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT).

Holton’s early revisionism on Einstein can be usefully seen in the context of a broader movement to bring a realism to the understanding of science. This can be understood as a part of a broader philosophical lean away from abstract epistemology, which Holton absorbed particularly through Bridgman and the post-World War II discussions among the positivist refugees then at Harvard and around Boston, most notably Philipp Frank (a friend and biographer of Einstein who facilitated Holton’s access to Einstein’s papers).

However, realism about scientific process was also a concern in science education, as young scientists indoctrinated in simplistic or false conceptions of science might struggle to be successful in an actual working environment or to perform with all the ingenuity that talented scientists can wield. See also Kuhn’s iconoclastic attitude toward science textbooks on the first page of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

For Holton, this conception of history as valuable for pedagogy informed his teaching in Harvard’s General Education program and his selection of AAPT and its journal as a major venue for his historical observations. Most significantly, though, it informed his central role developing the NSF-funded Harvard Project Physics high school curriculum, which he started working on as early as 1962 and continued to develop for the rest of the decade, with revisions thereafter.

Importantly, Holton did not aim to use cases to develop a generalized portrait of scientific method or the development of scientific knowledge. In his view, many elements of science were personalized and prone to changing over time, which was a major concern in the post-World War II era, when the scale, practices, and political and cultural prominence of physics were all undergoing dramatic transformation. In a 1961 article in the American Journal of Physics, examining an apparently growing interest in history among physicists, Holton wrote,

As a result of the phenomenally rapid change and growth of physics, the men and women who did their great work one or two generations ago may be our distant predecessors in terms of the state of the field. … The past few decades not only brought great progress in each of the special fields of physics, but also brought a powerful new set of tools and new conceptions for unifying large parts of science. Moreover, the successes of relativity theory and quantum mechanics changed the approach of physicists to their work in important ways and had effects on other fields of thought which philosophers are just beginning to see.

“On the Recent Past of Physics” (1961)

In Daedalus in 1962, Holton expanded on this theme in an article titled, “Scientific Research and Scholarship: Notes toward the Design of Proper Scales.” This piece makes clear that Holton’s concerns were not just about the value of history and philosophy, but also about the institutional development, social dynamics, and governance of science, all informed by quantitative measures of changes in the scientific enterprise. Derek de Solla Price would expand on these themes the same year in his lecture-turned-book, Little Science, Big Science, which prominently cites Holton’s work on the subject.

All of the above is just a quick, loosely structured tour through many of Holton’s activities circa 1960. Until recently, I was generally unaware of these activities, having mainly known Holton for his exposition on “themata” in scientific work, particularly as presented in his 1973 essay collection, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein. But, while Holton’s thought was clearly developing throughout the 1950s and ’60s, just as significant are the initiatives he championed, particularly in science education and in guiding how AIP approached its early history activities.