Pierre Duhem

Pierre Duhem was born in Paris in 1861, the son of a textile salesman, into a devoutly Catholic family. He studied at the Collège Stanislas, where a teacher encouraged his love of physics, and then at the École Normale Supérieure. His first doctoral thesis, on thermodynamic potentials, was rejected, reportedly because it criticized the work of a powerful chemist, Marcellin Berthelot. Partly because of this conflict and his conservative views, he spent his career outside Paris, teaching at Lille and Rennes and from 1894 at the University of Bordeaux. He made important contributions to thermodynamics, hydrodynamics and the theory of elasticity. In The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906) he argued that a scientific hypothesis can never be tested on its own, only together with other assumptions, an idea later called the Duhem–Quine thesis. As a historian he showed that medieval scholars had made important contributions to physics, challenging the view that the Middle Ages were scientifically barren; his findings appeared in The System of the World. He died in 1916.

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Faith: A Catholic who expected the endpoint of science to harmonize with the teachings of the Catholic Church. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy