You're looking for Feynman's Lectures on Physics. It's a 3 volume set (and accompanying audiovisuals are available on youtube) that gets at exactly this kind of

You're looking for Feynman's Lectures on Physics. It's a 3 volume set (and accompanying audiovisuals are available on youtube) that gets at exactly this kind of thinking. For example, the double slit experiment came out of a really simple question. Bullets seem to behave like particles, waves in water, like waves. Light seems to behave like a wave, as well. But we know from other experiments that sometimes it behaves like a particle (Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect demonstrates why). In fact, you can show that the diffraction of light is due to the behavior of light through a single slit, with spacing set appropriately for its wavelength. But what happens when you try to put electrons through? I don't think anyone expected the results. They're unintuitive and rightly stunning. But it was trying to understand the weird particle/wave duality of light that led to the result on electrons and subsequently other particles. The books go into a lot more detailed on the variants of the experiment people tried to try and understand the incredible results they were getting, like varying the rate at which particles were going through, adding detectors, etc..