Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

Just to add my own two cents here: while I absolutely agree that numerical simulation is a great approach for understanding physics, the canonical closed-form solutions really are a necessary step for building an intuitive understanding of principles like symmetry and the importance of choosing useful reference frames. These are things that are very well complemented by building numerical models (and I think it would be tough to build those models without that understanding of concepts like that in the first place), but it's important to recognize that it's very difficult to skip directly to the numerical models stage.

As I said, I think the parent covered that, but just wanted to try to make it a little more explicit.

Roger Penrose

Kip Thorne

Michio Kaku

Douglas Hofstadter

Isaac Asimov (non-fiction/essays)

All have written numerous excellent books on various physics topics, and each explains the concepts they wish to convey clearly, with as much or as little mathematics as you like.

Before I went to university to read physics, I devoured their (and others) popular science books, and had a pretty good understanding of the majority of the material on my degree course before I started it - the degree filled in the blanks, annealed the maths in my mind - but there’s little as good as a book written by an expert on a topic to imbue knowledge.

> (8) Counterintuitive: If you get completely stuck, move on! Learning often happens in non-linear ways. If you hit an insurmountable roadblock, just keep going. When you return in a few days/weeks, things will almost certainly be clearer.

This is something our education system does a poor job at.

My observation from watching a 3.5-year-old all the time is that bootstrapping most skills (e.g. riding a 2-wheeled scooter, solving simple logic puzzles, drawing, cutting with scissors, building structures out of construction toys) does not require frequent or extensive practice per se, but only practice spaced out in time, combined with a positive emotional outlook. The student can try something with limited success for a little while (maybe 15–30 minutes), go away for a few weeks, come try again and fail again, go away for another few weeks, etc., and after a few months there are sudden leaps in ability as the brain has apparently been churning away at the problem in the background without any obvious deliberate effort in between.

I think we should be organizing education to expose concepts and tools early before people are “ready”, but not putting any particular pressure on repeated failure/struggle, and then trying again intermittently.

Instead we try to organize instruction so that each idea, tool, or method is taught once, with students encountering something new for the first time and being expected to understand it through short-term brute effort and punished if they fail, and then often a concept or idea is subsequently left aside and not revisited.

You can take your Nordic feminist radical views and shove them up your ass. Do well to remember that.

Poppycock! A person's art is separable from their other beliefs and actions, and Feynman was among the best both in individual contributions and communication to laymen. In any case, I'm unaware of any attitude he had about women aside from wanting to have sex with most of them.