[1] He completed a master's degree in experimental and theoretical physics in 1941, before exams were banned after the German invasion of the Netherlands during World War II.

[1] In 1939 he became an assistant to Wander Johannes de Haas at the Kamerlingh-Onnes Institute in Leiden, where he worked together with Hendrik Casimir and carried out experiments on the adiabatic demagnetization of various paramagnetic salts using crystal field theory.

[citation needed] Due to the deteriorating conditions at Leiden after German occupation and threat of forced labor, he decided to move to the Philips Research Laboratory in Eindhoven in early 1943.

At the end of September 1948 he returned to the Netherlands, but in October 1950, prompted by an invitation from Mott, Polder decided to go back to Bristol, where he became a lecturer.

[1] In 1971, Polder and Michael van Hove pioneered the field of near-field radiative heat transfert theory simplifying the fluctuational electrodynamics formulas of Sergei Rytov.

Experiments by A. H. Harten on the dependence of the photovoltage on the penetration depth of light found were satisfactory explained by considering the influence of the surface space charge layer as suggested by Polder.

Together with P. Penning, Polder devoted several studies to the anomalous transmission of X-rays, the phenomenon of reducing attenuation when passing through a perfect crystal if the direction of propagation matches Bragg reflection at one or more lattice planes.