Harvard Project Physics
That’s what we called it: “Aitch-Pee-Squared,” a quasi-mathematical rendering of the initials of Harvard Project Physics, from whose early materials I’d taught at Capuchino High School, a year earlier. Through Merritt Kimball, I’d met Jim Rutherford, one of the founding leaders of the project and a predecessor in HGSE’s science education shop, and I have to presume that this connection helped funnel me into HGSE.

Fletcher G Watson 		Professor Fletcher G Watson, my new faculty adviser, and Professor Gerald Holton completed the triumvirate at the head of HP2. Their central idea, for whose realization I can take essentially no credit, was that the high school world needed a rigorous physics course designed for what we’d later call “the rest of us.” While there were good secondary-school courses for those who aspired to call themselves physicists, those materials were ill-adapted to people with other academic goals and useless to the many who saw their high-school diploma as a terminal credential. In the world of Sputnik, said Watson, Holton, Rutherford, and other great folks at Harvard, ordinary citizens shouldn’t remain as ignorant of physics as high school was leaving them.
So, we1 labored to weave history (particularly, of course, the history of science and of physics), art, and literature into a solid presentation of the development, language, and application of physics, with lots of human-interest stories about interesting humans who have taken part in it. HP2 later morphed into just “the Project Physics Course” and, I hope, pushed back the frontiers of ignorance to a significant degree. Meanwhile, I took another direction.

While associated with the Project, I briefly had an office in a former residence on Divinity Street in Cambridge. Doubt I could now locate it, if the building still stands.
1I came late to the drama and can’t really point to anything durable that I contributed.
Gerald Holton
Ed.D 1966-67: Courses HP2 Seminary Family 1967-68:
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