Man, t'Hooft is upping his design game! It looks mutch nicer than the previous versions which looked like they predated his nobel prize.
Yep. For everyone interested, this is the old version: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html
How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
61–70 of 76 posts
Re: How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
#62Re: How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
#63After a PhD in theoretical physics then 20 years as a s/w developer I decided to get some of my chops back. You can read and nod about stuff but until you face a blank sheet of paper you don't know if you really understood.
+1 for Penrose's "Road to Reality"
Also a huge fan of Eric Poisson's lectures (basically free textbooks) http://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/poisson/research/notes.html
Short description of getting my chops back: http://nbodyphysics.com/blog/2015/02/28/learn-physics-with-t...
Re: How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
#64this is a great site. it really makes a good case why no one should want to be a (good) physicist. reading this stuff takes decades i should think.
Re: How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
#65Re: How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
#66Has anyone here ever read or worked through Hrabovsky and Susskind's _The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics_? Same premise as this, I gather, but a whole book.
There is very much more content in these lectures than is covered in the two books.
Re: How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
#67Off topic: This seems to be an odd emphasis on the word "good". Can a native English speaker confirm?
Re: How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
#68I love this kind of site. Not that you can't scour up the content yourself using Google, but here's the thing... when you're trying to "teach yourself" something complex, one of the challenges you run into (in my experience) is understanding the order of the dependencies for prerequisites and sub-topics. And nothing is more frustrating than trying to read a book or a paper and feeling totally lost because you're miss…
Re: How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
#69Re: How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
#70I'm happy to see that there is someone who is trying to help those who don't want to or can't go the traditional route of undergrad => grad school. Certainly I'm sure there are many others like me who have a strong, but amateur interest in a subject. Here I mean amateur in the sense that it is unpaid and done only out of love, as opposed to some measure of skill. Sadly I have no intention of studying theoretical phys…
> If anyone could point me towards something for theoretical computer science and algorithms Cheap trick: google up university course pages like [1], look at the syllabus and get the books listed. MIT's OpenCourseware has lots of stuff [2]. [1] http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~aho/cs3261/ [2] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
However, I think that professors generally are very willing to help people who are interested, even if you aren't a student. Actually as far as I can tell usually they don't even ask if you are a student.