Background
Campbell was born on March 7, 1880, in London, the son of William Middleton Campbell, Governor of the Bank of England.
Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK
Trinity College, Cambridge
Windsor SL4 6DW, UK
Eton College
philosopher physicist scientist
Campbell was born on March 7, 1880, in London, the son of William Middleton Campbell, Governor of the Bank of England.
Campbell was educated at Eton and became a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1904 he became a fellow of Trinity College, where he worked mainly as a student of J. J. Thomson on the ionization of gases in closed vessels. In addition to performing successful experimental research in this field, he established, in collaboration with A. Wood, the radioactivity of potassium.
Campbell was appointed to the Cavendish research fellowship at Leeds where, in 1913, he became an honorary fellow for research in physics. While at Leeds he continued research on the ionization of gases by charged particles and on secondary radiation. After the start of World War I, he joined the research staff of the National Physical Laboratories, working on problems concerning the mechanism of spark discharge in plugs for internal combustion engines. Reports of this work were submitted to the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. In 1919 Campbell joined the research laboratories of the General Electric Company, Ltd.
As well as continuing his work on electrical discharge in gases, he worked on photoelectric photometry and color matching, the standardization and theory of photoelectric cells, statistical problems, the adjustment of observations, and the production of “noise” in thermionic valves and circuits. He published nine books and over eighty papers.
The last fifteen years of his life were spent in retirement - in ill health. Although Campbell distinguished himself as an experimental physicist, he devoted himself to careful study of both the theoretical and philosophical aspects of his science. Profoundly influenced by J. J. Thomson and the ideas of Faraday and Maxwell, he was basically a proponent of a mechanical view of physics.
Campbell died on May 18, 1949, in Nottingham, England.
The most notable of Campbell’s theses for the theory of science was his strongly urged distinction of laws and theories. He saw this as pivotal for even a beginning understanding of the nature and status of scientific propositions. Laws, he asserted, are propositions that can be established by experiment and observation, which does not mean that there are, in the main, overly simple relations between these laws and the fundamental propositions concerning our naive observations. Campbell was at pains to emphasize that almost all the laws of physics state relations between such concepts, and not between judgments of simple sensations. He was not unaware that there are fundamental laws, but he was reluctant to specify exactly how they are related to fundamental judgments, for it is at this level that, almost paradoxically, the concepts in question are too familiar for ease of analysis. With the basis of his account of the nature of scientific laws, Campbell elaborated his major thesis of the structure of theories and their distinction from laws.
In his monumental Physics (1919), he elaborated a non-inductive view of a scientific theory, according to which a theory is defined by means of the formal nature and connection of the propositions of which it consists, namely a ‘hypothesis' making assertions about ‘hypothetical ideas’ characteristic of the theory, and a ‘dictionary’ relating these ideas to the concepts of the laws explained by the theory. Thus he held that the boundary between the ‘hypothesis’ and the realm of sense experience is to be bridged by ‘dictionary’ entries which link certain of the ‘hypothetical ideas’ with experimentally measurable properties in order to achieve empirical significance for the theory as a whole, a point which he illustrated with reference to the dynamical theory of gases.
In 1912 Campbell married Edith Sowerbutts; the couple adopted two children.