So You Want to Learn Physics (2016)

So You Want to Learn Physics (2016)
susanjfowler.com

This is irritatingly common in economics also though with economics it's less often speculation and more often simplification to the point that it becomes misleading.

e.g. "black holes suck in matter around them". Many pop science physics books will make black holes sound unique in the way they are able to attract matter which misleads readers as it is just gravity being applied to a massive object.

But you do not need to study physics for 25 years in order to understand how the world works. Academic physics that she wants us to learn to undersdand the world is just a new academic subject invented or formalized in the 19. century. Archimedes knew 0 (zero) physics and made huge discoveries. Galileo was not a physicist in the modern sense of the word. Even Newton was not a physicist but a natural philosopher. Physics today is a professional field. By studying physics textbooks you will only gain enough knowledge to pass physics exams. It's much better to go out and look at nature directly. If you need specific mathematics just learn that part, solve your problem and move on. But academic physics, as she clearly mentions,claims to build on previous knowledge. This is the way of scholasticism. Scholastics claim that without spending two years studying calculus you cannot invert a matrix. (Because they make a living teaching you calculus.) This is not true. Knowledge is not linear. I can study and learn matrix operations with zero calculus knowledge. The opposite of scholasticism is just-in-time knowledge. Whatever I need I can look it up.

But thanks for posting this. There are good resources in it.

Also, this means that fundamental assumptions and the calculations are hidden from view. Recently, some physicists questioned the findings of LIGO but if I understand correctly all is decided by data analysis software and outside teams have a disadvantage to decipher it.