Grubb Family Tree

Bio in from Physicists Look Back: Studies in the History of Physics, to which he contributed:

Mr. Ronald Grubb Stansfield was born in Southampton in 1915. From 1933 he read natural sciences at Clare College, Cambridge. During 1936-1939 he was a research student in experimental physics at the Cavendish Laboratory. His war work was in Operational Research with the Royal Air Force. This prompted an interest in the human and social sciences which he has pursued ever since. Address: 62 Warwick Road, Bishop's Stortford, Herts CM23 5NW, UK.

From Physicists Look Back: Studies in the History of Physics

My father Herbert Stansfield (1872-1960) was an experimental physicist (Wood 1960), so I have had a relatively long acquaintance with physics, direct or at one remove. In 1895 my father became a Fellow of the Physical Society of London. Just after he died in 1960, I became a Life Fellow of the Society. During this connection of over 90 years, not only has the Physical Society been absorbed into the Institute of Physics, but physics itself, its nature and practice, has greatly changed.

When I was a boy, my father talked much to me about physics and about the things in the world around us which interested him as a physicist. My first active involvement in research was in 1927, when I was almost 12 year old. The War Office was test-firing big guns on the artillery range at Shoeburyness, on the north side of the Thames Estuary, and took the opportunity to study anomalous propagation of sound by refraction in the upper atmosphere. At Bristol University and at University College, Southampton, the Physics Departments were brought in as observing stations. Southampton, where my father was Professor, was expected to be within the zone of silence skipped by the sound, so we had the special challenge of showing a negative. To detect the sound, a Tucker hot-wire microphone was used, with an Einthoven string galvanometer recording on a moving strip of photographic paper (Stansfield 1927). To reduce wind noise, the microphone was placed in the middle of a bramble-patch near one of the deparment's ex-army wooden huts; my assignment was to sit with a stopwatch on the steps of the hut and record and time any noises, e.g. from a slammed door or a distant train, which might appear on the recorded trace.

A rarely noticed natural phenomenon pointed out to me by my father when I was a boy was the Reynolds line on slowly moving water. It appears to have been first recorded by Osborne Reynolds and often to have been independently rediscovered; Scriven and Sternling (1960) give much information. Different observers' descriptions vary; Schmidt (1936) said it is 'like a very fine thread or hair floating on the surface'. It seems to mark a boundary between areas of surface differing in contamination; Stansfield (1936) quoted my own observations: 'I often see the line on the river here [the upper Cam]; in any place where water is eddying up from below there may be a patch of clean surface marked by the bright line of boundary'. The line often appears to form loops, of no particular shape, lying sluggishly on the surface of the water; however, it behaves as if there were line-tension, so that it forms a curved loop, the loop appears to contract increasingly rapidly as the curvature increases, ending by 'snapping together' with circular ripples spreading out from the point where it disappeared; this provides a quite characteristic identifying feature. I noteed in 1975 (Stansfield 1975) that I was seeing the line less often than in the past; I thought then that this was because I was living and working in different places and saw different rivers and streams, for 'the Thames in London is too dirty to show the line'. Writing in 1988, I record that it is some years since I last observed the line, despite on various occasions deliberately looking for it in places where former experience made me expect to see it. My hypothesis is that at the present time the rivers and small streams where I have looked for the line all contain so much detergent residue that the surface conditions which produce the line never occur. Long ago my father observed that a few drops of soapy water added to a water-trough destroyed the line (Stansfield 1936). Does this mean that I will never be able to point out the line for the benefit of my grandchildren, as my father pointed it out to me? This is an unexpected instance of the problem of replication in science.

As well as giving me the habit of actively observing the world around me, my father taught me that scientists make hypotheses to explain what they have observed; that it is their duty to test each hypothesis by being always on the alert to notice anything inconsistent with the hypothesis, and to do their best to think of ways to look for something which might be inconsistent with the hypothesis. If one hypothesis were upset, then the challenge was to think of a beter one, one consistent with all that was observed and known. A hypothesis started as a tentative explanation; the more challenges and tests it survived, the more firmly it became established and moved from being 'hypothesis' to 'accepted theory'. But theories were never to be taken as final: the duty always remained to be on the watch for an observation, an experiment, inconsistent with the theory which would show it to be inadequate. I do not know how old I was by the time this basic principle had been instilled into me; I am sure it was firmly there by the time I was 15, i.e. by the year 1930. Moreover, I am sure that it was not something my father had recently acquired, but was something he regarded as long accepted. It may be of some importance for the history of the philosophy of science that this would make my absorbing it not later than four years before Popper (4 BP!), that is four years before the appearance of Popper's Logik der Forschung in 1934. With regard to philosophy, I lived a very sheltered life at school and then in the Cavendish Laboratory; I never heard of the 'hypothetico-deductive method' until after World War II. During the war I was engaged in operational research using my natural science training and experience to study applied problems of behaviour within organisms. In this research we needed to find out more about regularities of behavior of assemblages of diverse sorts; on the whole, the problems concerning assemblages of machines were less important than problems concerning assemblages of human beings. A consequence was that I became commensal with psychologists and sociologists, and found them speaking often of 'the hypothetico-deductive method' (Stansfield 1981).