Dr Jorge S. Diaz's History of Quantum Mechanics

It's really great to see how all the maths was developed and how the physical theories followed. Often it seems that it was the mathematical developments that gave the physicists the ideas about which models would yield solvable equations!

See  Jorge Diaz on Heisenberg's "Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen" and Robinson Erhardt - Tim Maudlin & Jacob Barandes: The Indivisible Approach to Quantum Theory.

These two fill in some more gaps:

In this one we get a look (7:45) at how Dirac "unified" the Heisenberg and Schrödinger pictures. See Gabriele Carcassi on Why Statistical Mechanics is Fundamental in Physics:

 

See also his recent short essay: How fundamental physics progresses. I looked into his claim that Maxwell's electrodynamics followed from a mathematical inconsistency in Ampere's law. That may be what actually happened, but it is hard to say whether the inconsistency was purely mathematical or to do with the way the mathematics was interpreted as representing some physical ontology. See this post and my comment:

YouTube calls this a backstage event, ... On Maxwell's modification of Ampere's law: I found this aside interesting https://youtu.be/l2OHSZ84mq4?t=10m35s You can derive the continuity equation from the Ampere-Maxwell law, or you can use the continuity equation to derive the Ampere-Maxwell law. But if you look at his 'derivation' of the continuity equation https://youtu.be/o4nguVtPQ9g then you see he presents it as an empirical law. It says that the divergence of the current density is opposite to the time rate of change of the charge density. In a sense, then, that could be taken as a consequence of settling on a model of current as being the result of the motion of particles carrying elementary charge. Is there any other way to make sense of this from a point of view of continuous fields? This fellow teaches at UCL and has written a book on "atomistic computer simulations". Sounds like a lot of unnecessary calculation! At the end of this he gives the empirical basis of the law: it's charge conservation.

Then the same day, I heard Tim Maudlin mention Quine's Confirmation Holism:

In philosophy of science, confirmation holism, or epistemological holism, is the view that no individual statement can be confirmed or [denied] by an empirical test, but rather that only a set of statements (a whole theory) can be. It is attributed to Willard Van Orman Quine who motivated his holism through extending Pierre Duhem's problem of underdetermination in physical theory to all knowledge claims.

See Robinson Erhardt - Tim Maudlin & Jacob Barandes: The Indivisible Approach to Quantum Theory.

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