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81 points pykello | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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pkoird ◴[] No.45146435[source]
Nice effort. As far as textbooks for QM, Electrodynamics, and any sufficiently complex field of study goes, I always feel that these have been written using abstractions that people have developed much later retroactively. I understand the advantages: it makes the entire content concise, structured, and basically straightforward. However, what I crave is a technical book that is based upon the history of the subject. Something that doesn't start immediately with Hilbert spaces but starts off by talking about why Max Plank did what he did, how did Einstein improve upon it, what mistakes were made, what misguided hypothesis were later corrected in what manner, how were different things then unified... you get the point. I think this narrative based approach would motivate me much better than something that's condensed and distilled.
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1. griffzhowl ◴[] No.45147928[source]
Weinberg's Lectures on Quantum Mechanics has an illuminating historical introduction for its first chapter. The introduction to his Quantum Theory of Fields is more specifically about quantum field theory, fittingly, and focuses on later developments.

If you want something that's more focused throughout on the historical progression, a classic book is Jammer's Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics, but it assumes you're already familiar with quantum and statistical mechanics.

If you like videos, the physicist Jorge Diaz has excellent videos accessibly detailing the experimental and theoretical history https://www.youtube.com/@jkzero/playlists