History of Physics before Einstein

by Pierre Duhem

A history of physics before Einstein with an active table of contents. Topics include the I. A Glance at Ancient Physics II. Science and Early Christian Scholars III. A Glance at Arabian Physics IV. Arabian Tradition and Latin Scholasticism V. The Science of Observation and Its Progress VI. The Articles of Paris (1277) VII. The Earth's Motion VIII. Plurality of Worlds IX. Dynamics X. Propagation of the Doctrines of the School of Paris in Germany and Italy XI. Italian Averroism and its Tendencies to Routine XII. The Copernican Revolution XIII. Fortunes of the Copernican System in the Sixteenth Century XIV. Theory of the Tides XV. Statics in the Sixteenth Century XVI. Dynamics in the Sixteenth Century XVII. Galileo's Work XVIII. Initial Attempts in Celestial Mechanics XIX. Controversies concerning Geostatics XX. Descartes's Work XXI. Progress of Experimental Physics XXII. Undulatory Theory of Light XXIII. Development of Dynamics XXIV. Newton's Work XXV. Progress of General and Celestial Mechanics in the Eighteenth Century XXVI. Establishment of the Theory of Electricity and Magnetism XXVII. Molecular Attraction XXVIII. Revival of the Undulatory Theory of Light XXIX. Theories of Heat

71 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 30, 2011

About the author

Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (French: [pjɛʁ moʁis maʁi dy.ɛm] was a French physicist, mathematician, historian and philosopher of science. He is best known for his work on chemical thermodynamics, for his philosophical writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria, and for his historical research into the science of the European Middle Ages. As a scientist, Duhem also contributed to hydrodynamics and to the theory of elasticity.

Duhem's views on the philosophy of science are explicated in his 1906 work The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. In this work, he opposed Newton's statement that the Principia's law of universal mutual gravitation was deduced from 'phenomena', including Kepler's second and third laws. Newton's claims in this regard had already been attacked by critical proof-analyses of the German logician Leibniz and then most famously by Immanuel Kant, following Hume's logical critique of induction. But the novelty of Duhem's work was his proposal that Newton's theory of universal mutual gravity flatly contradicted Kepler's Laws of planetary motion because the interplanetary mutual gravitational perturbations caused deviations from Keplerian orbits. Since no proposition can be validly logically deduced from any it contradicts, according to Duhem, Newton must not have logically deduced his law of gravitation directly from Kepler's Laws.

Duhem's name is given to the under-determination or Duhem–Quine thesis, which holds that for any given set of observations there is an innumerable large number of explanations. It is, in essence, the same as Hume's critique of induction: all three variants point to the fact that empirical evidence cannot force the choice of a theory or its revision. Possible alternatives to induction are Duhem's instrumentalism and Popper's thesis that we learn from falsification.

As popular as the Duhem–Quine thesis may be in the philosophy of science, in reality, Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine stated very different theses. Pierre Duhem believed that experimental theory in physics is fundamentally different from fields like physiology and certain branches of chemistry. Also, Duhem's conception of the theoretical group has its limits, since not all concepts are connected to each other logically. He did not include at all a priori disciplines such as logic and mathematics within these theoretical groups in physics which can be tested experimentally. Quine, on the other hand, conceived this theoretical group as a unit of a whole human knowledge. To Quine, even mathematics and logic must be revised in light of recalcitrant experience, a thesis that Duhem never held.

A quote of Duhem on physics:

A theory of physics is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of principles, which have for their aim to represent as simply, as completely and as exactly as possible, a group of experimental laws.