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Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

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Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

#1

Post by hsikka »

Hey HN,

I'm a CS graduate student, and I do a lot of Deep Learning Research. I've always wanted to get a strong foundation in Physics, and while on lockdown because of COVID, I thought it would be a great opportunity.

I've run across this incredible guide https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2016/8/13/so-you-want-to-l... and I was also thinking about going through MIT Open Courseware following their bachelor's curriculum.

Do you all have any suggestions or tips? I really appreciate it!

Re: Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

#2

Post by Areading314 »

Some tips:

* Don't get discouraged. Physics is hard!

* Work on problems, and don't let yourself look at the solutions too soon. Sometimes it takes a few days of thinking to solve a problem.

* When reading through equations, go really slow. Make sure you fully understand each step and don't let yourself skim.

Edit: +1 for the guide you linked, it looks excellent.

Re: Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

#4

Post by fyp »

Your link is already a great resource, thanks for that! I didn't know Susan Fowler was a physics major at UPenn.

The tl;dr; seems to be get "University Physics with Modern Physics" and go from there?

Re: Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

#5

Post by greattsclerouse »

I'd recommend starting here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/audio-video-courses/#physics

In my experience these are some of the best online courses you can watch to learn physics. Personally, I would look into the trying to watch the lectures from Walter Lewin--Walter is a fantastic orator and has a really great mad-scientist persona that is really captivating. Some additional archived lectures can be found here: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34001 and here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/archived-physics-courses...

I got my minor in physics from NYU many many moons ago (yes I'm getting old), but I found that the MIT lectures and OCW materials went way beyond the NYU coursework in both breadth and depth. I watched these lectures and worked through the lecture notes & assignments for Physics I, II, III, Quantum I, II, and several others in addition to digging into the Mathematics lectures / content. I found this material to be the most helpful out there. I'll also point out that I emailed the professors (Lewin, and others) and was pleased to receive a warm and helpful response on several occasions. I hope these are as helpful for your learning as they were for mine.

Once, you are able to complete the video lectures here, OCW has a massive amount of content for some of the more advanced courses that aren't in video format. In my experience, going through these video lectures and some of the mathematics lectures should set you up well to be able to comprehend even the most advanced content across field theory and string theory.

Cheers!

Re: Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

#7

Post by 8bitsrule »

For a 'strong foundation', you'll want to look at a first-year textbook and make sure your math skills are up to it. Use something with an eraser on it.

Old joke from Anonymous: "Theoretical physicists aren't very expensive -- they only need a blackboard and an eraser. Compare that to a philosopher -- much the same but without the eraser."

Re: Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

#8

Post by yummypaint »

There are some general concepts that make frequent appearances, it's worth looking out for them because they can help form connections between different areas. Some examples: 1. the harmonic oscillator and associated quadratic potential. 2. Wave-like phenomena and the wave equation. This comes up in all kinds of mechanical and em systems, plus the schroedinger equation itself. 3. Decomposition of functions into orthogonal sets of other functions, its not just a mathematical trick, but a powerful way of reconceptualizing things. 4. Approximations and expansions are everywhere. Always keep in mind what it is youre solving for and look at its sensitivity to other properties of the system.

Re: Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

#9

Post by FuckButtons »

Start by brushing up on your math, there’s not much you can really get into without first getting into the calculus of variations, which you probably haven’t covered. From that you can get into Hamiltonian mechanics and from there you can start to really grapple with quantum mechanics.

After dealing with the more technical side, you should read Paul Dirac’s book “the principles of quantum mechanics”

Re: Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

#10

Post by gjstein »

I was a physicist for a time and I learned physics via numerical simulation: I would find problems I could solve by hand and code them up---solving integrals, derivatives, systems of equations all numerically and comparing the results. Only a handful of physics problems have closed-form solutions, and being able to turn an interesting problem into code and "play around with it" was enormous fun for me and helped me build intuition as well. This advice strongly depends on your mathematics background, but with some basic calculus you can already start playing around.
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