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Gerald Holton: Worlds Within Worlds by Barbara Delman Wolfson

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Gerald Holton: Worlds Within Worlds by Barbara Delman Wolfson NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES • VOLUME 2 NUMBER 2 • APRIL 1981 Humanities Gerald Holton: Worlds within worlds by b a r b a r a d e l m a n w o l f s o n PROLOGUE: It is January 1934 in the city of Par­ working nature, of the style and life of the sci­ is. A husband and wife are at work in a university entist, and of the power of the human mind." laboratory. They are exposing a piece of ordinary alu­ Hundreds of thousands of students in this minum to a stream of tiny charged bits of matter country in secondary schools and colleges have called alpha particles. Stated so simply, this hardly used the course, now in the third edition since sounds like an important event. But look more Close­ its commercial publication in 1970, and millions ly, for it is important indeed. Later you will look at more around the world have used the materials the technical details, but for now they will not get in in French, Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian the way of the story. and other language adaptations. Although few The story is something of a family affair. The will ever become scientists, they will have a husband and wife are the French physicists Frederic chance to "see physics as the wonderfully Joliot and Irene Curie. The alpha particles they are many-sided human activity that it really is." using in their experiment are shooting from a piece of Throughout his career as physicist, histori­ naturally radioactive metal. This metal is polonium, an, editor, and educator, Holton has been a lu­ first identified 36 years before by Irene's parents, cid interpreter of the complexity of the scientific Pierre and Marie Curie, the discoverers of radium. enterprise and the scientific imagination to What Frederic and Irene have found is that when scholars and practitioners in other disciplines as common aluminum is bombarded by alpha particles, well as his own. In the late 1950s he launched it too becomes radioactive fo r a short time. and edited Daedalus, the journal of the Ameri­ This was a surprise. Until that moment, a fa­ can Academy of Arts and Sciences, as a forum miliar, everyday substance becoming artificially radi- for serious dialogue on questions and ideas that cut across all fields of intellectual inquiry. Entire What student, opening an introductory high- issues of Daedalus have been devoted to science school physics text, can read that passage and and culture, the future metropolis, symbolism resist turning the page to find out what hap­ in religion and literature, mass culture and pens next in what promises to be a great adven­ mass media, arms control—most, if not all, of ture story? Telling a rousing story is indeed the the seminal questions of our time. To a whole aim of the Project Physics Course, a national generation of intellectuals, Daedalus exemplified curriculum codirected by Gerald Holton, "interdisciplinary studies" long before the term Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor came into academic fashion. of the History of Science at Harvard—the 1981 Twenty years later, Holton founded the NEH Jefferson Lecturer and first natural scien­ journal, Science, Technology and Human Values, tist to be so honored. published by the MIT press, and was one of the The team of collaborators who prepared the initiators and first faculty members of MIT's course hoped, Holton has written, "to develop new College of Science, Technology and Socie­ a sequence of organically related ideas whose Macrocosm to microcosm: the globe, a spiral galaxy, ty, which aims to incorporate humanities study pursuit takes a student to an ever higher van­ the symmetry of Leonardo, a pond's concentric rip­ into the science and engineering curriculum. He tage point, a more encompassing view of the ples, diffraction pattern of charged particles. is recognized as a leading Einstein scholar, and took on the job of organizing the first catalogue maps. On the left, a geopolitical map of Europe raisonnee of Einstein papers at Princeton, thus and Asia. This map "was regularly changed," a making the documents accessible to other re­ new one for each period, and. searchers. with each change we students could see the In Philosopher Stephen Toulmin has written violent, spasmodic, unpredictable pulsation that: of shapes and colors in the wake of the Few people in the United States have thrilling story of conquests. this done as much as Gerald Holton to foster an On the right side was a very different appreciation of science as a social and cul­ map—the Periodic Table of the elements: tural force, to promote an understanding of the very embodiment of empirical, testable, the links between science, philosophy and reliable, and ordered sets of truths. That issue... art. map was never changed, although there As an emissary who travels freely and easi­ was a rumor in the benches that some of ly between science and the humanities, Holton the blank spaces were being filled in. "To the young mind," he writes, the gulf 1 Gerald Holton: Worlds within spans what are often perceived to be the closed between the maps "seemed like a division that Worlds by Barbara Delman Wolfson borders between the two worlds. His work is informed by the conviction that the supposed demanded some sort of decision." (The adult 4 New Directions in Science, Tech­ dichotomy between scholarship in science and Holton was to observe that Einstein saw it as a nology and Human Values scholarship in the humanities is false and artifi­ choice between a world "dominated by wishes, cial. He has consciously directed his energy, he hopes, and primitive feelings," and "this huge 13 NEH Grant Application Deadlines says, to "smashing” what he sees as "a strange world which exists independently of human be­ thing, an unnatural barrier between the sci­ ings," contemplation of which "beckoned like a 14 Dialogue on Applied Ethics by ences and all other materials taught." liberation.") "Only much later in life," Holton William F. May and Annette Baier This was not always so. To Holton as a has written, does it become clear "that these two kinds of destiny are in fact intertwined, Dustjackets: Research Tools and child in post-World War I Vienna, the gap be­ 16 that these two developments stem from two po­ Reference Works by George Farr tween the orderly world of science and the ever-changing panorama of history seemed tentials within the same person." 18 NEH Fellowships: An Overview by "unbridgeable." At the Gymnasium, Holton also read James Blessing Holton was born in Berlin of Austrian par­ Hegel, and vividly recalls the lesson on Hegel's ents in 1922 and was schooled at the rigorous pronouncement: "The final cause of the world 20 Fellowships for College Teachers classical Humanistische Gymnasium. In a re­ at large, we allege to be the consciousness of its cent article in The American Journal of Physics he own freedom on the part of spirit, and ipso facto 22 1981 NEH Fellowship Awards recollects the traditional, sharp division be­ the reality of that freedom." 27 1982 NEH Budget Goes to Congress tween history and science: I must confess that this formula, when The curriculum at our Gymnasium was presented in history class, was not easy to 28 About the Authors heavy on history, literature, and ancient unpuzzle; but it had a nice ring to it. Histo­ languages. Here was the vibrant, ry as the evolution of freedom seemed an In the Next Issue. colorful, ever unfinished struggle of appealing idea. But just at that point in our mankind. studies, this train of thought was deprived On the other hand, in our science classes, of a good deal of its credibility when, one we encountered an entirely different uni­ Friday evening in March, the portion of the verse. Here was the finished and apparent­ map of Europe showing Austria turned ly unchanging product of distant and large­ suddenly brown, and our history teacher, ly anonymous personages, unchallengeable like many teachers in the other subjects, monuments to their inexorable rational­ turned up in Nazi regalia on the following I ^ FOR INFORMATION ABOUT ity—but only occasional traces of historic Monday. development. SUBSCRIPTIONS SEE PAGE 27 His family, forced to flee Austria after the At the front of the classroom hung two Anschluss in 1938, went to England and, two Humanities Editor's Notes a bimonthly review published by the According to the recent Commission on the Hu­ another article describes a new program in ap­ National Endowment for the Humanities manities' report, ". science and technology plied ethics designed specifically for senior gov­ Chairman: Joseph D. Duffey have been a domain of the humanities in west­ ernment managers. Director of Public Affairs: Barry D. Wanger ern culture every since its Greek origins." That there are differences about the value Editor: Judith Chayes Neiman The author of those words might have been of applied ethics is manifestly apparent in our Editorial Board: James Blessing, Harold Gerald Holton, the tenth Jefferson Lecturer in Dialogue between two distinguished schol­ Cannon, Carole Huxley, Myron Marty, the Humanities. For even as the late C.P. Snow ars—a moral philosopher and a philosopher B.J. Stiles, Martin Sullivan, Armen Tashdinian, Barry D. Wanger, Judith was proclaiming his "two cultures" theory— cum religious scholar. Chayes Neiman stressing the divisions between science and the We also call your attention to Dustjackets, Managing Editor: Linda Blanken humanities—Professor Holton was founding which begins, in this issue, a three-part series Production Manager: Robert Stock Daedalus, the interdisciplinary journal of the on research tools and reference works—the life­ Librarian: Jeanette Coletti American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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