Pierre Duhem

Pierre Duhem was a French theoretical physicist and philosopher of science who worked extensively across thermodynamics, hydrodynamics and elasticity theory while at the University of Bordeaux. In physics, Duhem contributed to generalized thermodynamics, co-developing what is now called the Gibbs-Duhem equation relating changes in chemical potential within a system, and advocated energetics, an approach seeking to found physical theory on energy and thermodynamic principles rather than mechanical models of underlying particles. Duhem is best remembered in philosophy of science for what is now called the Duhem-Quine thesis, the argument that no single scientific hypothesis can be tested in isolation because any prediction depends on a whole web of auxiliary assumptions, so that an experiment's failure calls the entire theoretical structure into question rather than definitively refuting one isolated claim; Duhem used this holism to argue against the possibility of a genuinely crucial experiment that could decisively refute a single hypothesis. In his ten-volume history Le systeme du monde, Duhem argued that medieval scholars had anticipated key ideas later credited to Galileo and other figures of the early modern scientific revolution, a position that reshaped subsequent historical understanding of medieval science's contribution to the origins of modern physics.