D'Agostino S. A History of the Ideas of Theoretical Physics. Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Physics

Springer, 2000. — 381 p. — (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 213) — ISBN 978-1402002441, 1402002440Through the study of the ideas of the great fathers of theoretical physics, such as Ampere, Weber, Helmholtz, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Einstein, Schrodinger, et al., this book affords an improved understanding of modern physics. Author's main field of interest concerns the physicists' conceptions of the methods and nature of science. In his view, innovative conceptions contributed to important achievements in theoretical physics. Dissenting from the historiography of the linear development of scientific ideas, he duly underlines the fact that, in the passage from nineteenth-century electrodynamics to theoretical physics, the process of mathematization varied remarkably, ranging from Ampere's and Weber's algebraization to Maxwell's attention to mathematical analogies and dimensional analysis, not to mention Einstein's non-Euclidean approach to general relativity and the via-operators formulation of quantum theory. The author describes how, in the same period of time, physicists modified their ideas on the theory-experiment relationship, as shown, for example, by Hertz's theoretical holism, and by Boltzmann's discrediting of crucial experiments.
As such, this book will prove a useful addition to the culture of modern scientists and philosophers, and it could be influential in orienting teachers towards new approaches to teaching physics at undergraduate and graduate levels. It is aimed at historians of physics, epistemologists, professors of physics, PhD candidates in history of science, undergraduate and graduate students in history of physics and of science, and, last but not least, the cultured lay general reader.
From mechanics to electrodynamics
A consideration on the changing role of mathematics in Ampere's and Weber's electrodynamics.
A survey of theories of units and dimensions in 19th-century physics.
A historical role for dimensional analysis in Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light.
Problems of theoretical physics in the second half of the 19th century.
Electromagnetic waves
German electrodynamics in the 1870s.
Hertz's experiments on electromagnetic waves.
Hertz's 1884 theoretical discovery of electromagnetic waves.
A foundation for theoretical physics in Hertz's introduction to Die Prinzipien der Mechanik.
On Boltzmann's mechanics and his Bild-conception of physical theory.
From relativity to quantum theory
Einstein's correspondence criterium and the construction of general relativity.
Einstein's life-long doubts on the physical foundations of the general relativity and unified field theories.
Correspondence and complementarity in Niels Bohr's papers 1925-1927.
From the 1926 wave mechanics to a second quantizations theory: Schroedinger's new interpretation of wave mechanics and microphysics in the 1950s.
Conclusions.