Today is the 103rd birthday of Gerald Holton, who, among his many accomplishments as a physicist and historian, was a key figure in establishing our history program here at AIP in the early 1960s. To celebrate the occasion, we dug into our archives to learn a little more about that moment in our shared history.

A scientist grounded in humanism

Holton has told his own story on various occasions. The early years of his life were lived in the shadow of Nazism. He was born in Berlin in 1922, but his family, who were Austrian Jews, soon moved back to Vienna due to the violence being perpetrated by Nazis and other right-wing groups. Following Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, Holton looked down from his father’s office as Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna in an open-top car, greeted by raucous crowds. The situation for Jews rapidly deteriorated, and Holton and his brother, by great luck, landed a spot in the Kindertransport rescue effort that brought Jewish children to Britain. In a further stroke of remarkable good fortune, the Holton brothers soon reunited with their parents and emigrated to the United States.

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Wesleyan University, Holton received a PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1947, joined the faculty there, and never left. He remained active as an experimental physicist into the mid-1970s, but from his education in Vienna onward, his interests consistently straddled science and the humanities. At Harvard, he studied under and worked with physicists who also wrote on philosophy, such as Percy Bridgman, Edwin Kemble, and Philipp Frank, and he taught in Harvard President James Conant’s General Education program, which sought to give undergraduates a well-rounded foundation across disciplines.

Holton wrote on historical and philosophical topics from early on in his career, but an inflection point in his scholarship arrived after the death of Albert Einstein in 1955, when he began exploring and organizing Einstein’s papers with the guidance of Einstein’s longtime secretary Helen Dukas. This research led Holton to discover that Einstein approached his work in a very individualized fashion that diverged from the stories commonly told about it. In 1956, Holton also became the editor for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and set an ambitious direction for its then-new journal Daedalus.

Holton and AIP vs. the Smithsonian

Thus, in 1959, when AIP Director Elmer Hutchisson became dismayed with the Smithsonian Institution’s intended portrayal of physics in its new Museum of History and Technology, Holton was a reasonable person to turn to. Plans for the museum called for a hall focused on classical physics, astronomy, and mathematics; a separate hall of electricity; and a third hall devoted to nuclear energy—a strangely disjointed division of subject matter.

Agreeing to chair a committee to advise the Smithsonian, Holton insisted that the committee’s scope expand to cover any matters related to the history and philosophy of physics. But the museum was still top priority. The committee visited the Smithsonian in April 1960 and met with its head, Leonard Carmichael. Reporting back to Hutchisson, and in later reminiscences, Holton recalled how Carmichael went to his office window and pointed proudly to the long lines of buses in front of the museum buildings below, ferrying droves of visitors. In his report, Holton wrote that Carmichael “implied that this is both his warrant for doing what is being done now and his cross which prevents him from doing anything very much else.”

Holton went on, “In my ignorance, I remain profoundly unimpressed by this argument, but I also saw that we are not likely to change matters easily until we have reeducated their conception of what is worthy to be shown to any number n of visitors, where n may be as high as six and a half million or more. There is, I suspect, a fundamental ideological attitude at work here: the extreme permissiveness of the design of the museum is connected with the general feeling that everything is as good as everything else, that nobody must be forced to know or understand or look at anything that he doesn’t wish to give his attention to, that imposing a direction upon the attention of the wandering visitor smacks of European authoritarianism. Needless to say, none of this was expressed consciously or verbally by the Smithsonian staff.”

In Holton’s view, the Smithsonian had missed an opportunity to realize “what a good museum could do at its best.” He felt its exhibits should reflect a curatorial understanding of the “coherence and unity” of its subject matter. Such an outlook would certainly be needed to gain scientists’ confidence so that they would treat the museum as a “national repository of intellectually important treasures, such as important equipment and manuscripts.”

Holton sensed this last argument made some impression on Carmichael, but he concluded to Hutchisson (emphases in original), “In the future, it is clear that in our dealings with large organizational groups such as this we must try to come in early. Then we must be ready to do a thorough job of education. And also we must be prepared to provide through a Committee such as ours a reservoir of general ideas which the beleaguered administrator or his staff cannot work up themselves.”

A proposal, a recruit, a reputation, and a grant

The notion that AIP should undertake a history initiative began to cohere in the summer of 1960, focused on the idea of hiring James King, the curator for electricity at the new museum. King began his career as a physicist, but at that moment he was on the cusp of receiving a history PhD under Henry Guerlac at Cornell University. In his report to Hutchisson, Holton identified King as someone who had “developed a set of very sensible and in fact daring ideas for exhibition, such as energy level and parity,” and he was “rather unhappy to boot.”

In June, Holton and AIP’s education director, William Kelly, reached out to King to discuss a prospective project to survey “physics apparatus of historical importance in the United States”—an idea still clearly tied to the discontent over the Smithsonian. In a proposal that AIP circulated widely in December, experimental apparatus remained the central focus, but there was now also a reference to an “implicit objective of stimulating scientists and institutions to develop a concern for the preservation of historical material, and to help them where possible to initiate locally appropriate steps to this end.” (That essential concept has continued to be elemental to AIP’s strategy in history for sixty-four years.)

The proposal received positive feedback, but its implementation depended on finding the funding to hire King and support project operations. AIP considered private foundations and the ten-year-old National Science Foundation as potential sources. In his response to AIP’s circulated proposal, NSF’s associate director for educational and international activities reacted positively, noting it would be a new activity for the agency, but one it might well support, particularly given the involvement of a scholar of Holton’s stature.

The concept for the project came together quickly in 1961, with a decision to locate it at AIP headquarters in New York City rather than a university, and to focus on producing a “source book” of materials that could be used to document the recent history of physics in the US. AIP submitted a grant application to NSF in February, and at the end of June the agency awarded $69,600 (about $750,000 in today’s dollars), covering two years of planned work.

NSF renewed the grant for a further two years in 1963, and on July 1, 1965, AIP transitioned the project into a permanent unit that was originally called the Center for History and Philosophy of Physics. The center encompassed both the NSF-funded project and a privately funded library that AIP established at its headquarters and named in honor of Niels Bohr. James King remained with the project until 1964, when he moved to a lectureship at Berkeley and his role passed to Charles Weiner, who then directed the center for nearly a decade in partnership with librarian Joan Warnow.

Holton served as chair of the center’s advisory committee for many years and has remained a friend to us over the decades. The records and memories of scientists that AIP has helped to preserve, the number of scholars we have helped support, and the great expanse of history that has been researched and communicated as a result are all a testament to the power of a simple idea well stewarded. As an inheritor of that idea, I am, I hope, appropriately awed by the responsibility of carrying it forward.

From all of us at AIP (and no doubt our good friends at the Smithsonian, too): Happy 103rd birthday, Prof. Holton!

William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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