These have been acknowledged by an unusually wide spectrum of appointments and honors, from physics to initiatives in education and other national, societal issues, to contributions for which he was selected, as the first scientist, to give the tenth annual Jefferson Lecture that the National Endowment for the Humanities describes as, “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished achievement in the humanities”.
Forced by the rise of fascism in Germany, and one physical attack on the young family, they returned early to Vienna, Austria.
In 1938, the annexation of Austria by Germany made life for Jews there dangerous, as was widely understood after the nationwide Pogrom of November 8–9.
At that point, he was able to leave for America with his rejoined family, just days before having to report for incarceration for the duration, as was required for all male adult German refugees, by Prime Minister Churchill's directive.
From the outbreak of the war he found himself officially among the “Enemy Aliens”, as marked by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's directive for all holders of German passports.
Nonetheless, he was asked to join the Harvard-based war-time research unit, the Electric-Acoustic Laboratory, OSRD, and also was teaching assistant on the staff to train naval officers in the use and repair of radar equipment.
For 30 years, starting from his thesis, he ran a high-pressure physics laboratory, specializing in the structure of liquids, and having the usual flow-through of research students and publications.
It resulted in his publication of his first book, Introduction to Concepts and Theories of Physical Science (Addison Wesley: 1952, and later editions and adaptations), which has been called a seminal work of its kind.
In these, as in Holton's other educational opportunities, he has been guided by the advice of Alfred North Whitehead, that “In the conditions of modern life, the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed”.
[12] Holton's service at Harvard included chairmanship of the Concentration on Physics and Chemistry, of the initial General Education Course, membership on the Faculty Council, and on the advisory board of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study.
For a couple of years before, the academy had been publishing an experimental, annual, in-house volume called Daedalus, distributed to its members.
As he put it in his first issue (Winter 1958),[15] his vision for the journal aimed "to give the intellectual community a strong voice of its own", and to "lift each of us above our individual cell in the labyrinth of learning", so as "to see the entire structure".
[16] The journal served as adult education and several issues looked ahead at problems on the horizon that would have an effect on public policy, such as those on "Arms Control and Disarmament" (fall 1960), on "The Woman in America" (spring 1964), on African Americans (fall and winter 1965, with a foreword by President Lyndon B. Johnson[17]), and on "Ethical Aspects of Experimentation with Human Subjects" (spring 1969).
[20][22] While studying the rich contents of Einstein's collection, Holton came to realize a fact that led to a new and fruitful part of his researches on this and other scientists.
These concepts included, in his theory construction, the primacy of the search for unity; invariance; formal rather than materialistic explanation; logical parsimony; symmetry; the continuum, causality, and completeness.
He found these crucial, style-defining and differing thematic sets to be also at the core of research of many other scientists, from antiquity to Johannes Kepler to Niels Bohr.
[23][25] His findings led Holton to the publication of his book, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (Harvard University Press, 1973, revised edition 1988).
Each of those paradigms, in turn, was said to pervade the whole social group of scientists at a given time and in the same way—as is disproved even by the famous mutual oppositions between contemporaries such as Einstein, Schroedinger, and Heisenberg.
Therefore, with his colleague Dr. Gerhard Sonnert, a sociologist of science, he initiated a long-term research effort, called Project Access.
A second occasion for engaging in a public issue study arose when it became of general interest to explore what immigrants can bring to the betterment of society in the U.S.A. Dr. Sonnert and Holton committed to a several-years study, called Second Wave, to determine, by questionnaires and face-to-face interviews, what was achieved by immigrants who had come as children to the US as refugees from Nazi persecution compared to American-borns.
The results were published by them in a book, What Happened to the Children Who Fled Nazi Persecution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, with a preface by Bernard Bailyn; German translation, Was geschah mit den Kindern, Lit Verlag, Muenster, 2008).
Holton's researches in the history and philosophy of science as well as in education were published in a number of works, most of them available online and many of them translated into other languages.
Abraham Pais Prize of the American Physical Society, 2008; Republic of Austria's Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst, 2008; member, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2016.