A book 
by Andrew Pickering about recurrent patterns in scientific discovery. He emphasizes that science is something you *do*, not something you *think*. He attributes a sort of brute stubbornness to the material world and characterizes scientific discovery as a sort of back-and-forth process where the scientist pushes, the world pushes back, and the scientist adapts.
more links
One of Pickering's case studies is Hamilton's Invention of quaternions. He uses it to flesh out his idea of *disciplinary agency*. I summarized it in a blog post .