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Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

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

#41

Post by steerablesafe »

Hi, I'm a physicist and former IPhO contestant from Hungary. Unfortunately most of the books I could suggest are Hungarian, but there are some resources in English for hard physics problems.

KoMaL [1] is a high school competition, students have one month to solve five physics problems (they can solve more, but only the five best is counted each month). Unfortunately older archives are only in Hungarian, but this is an endless resource, you can come back for new problems each month.

Ortvay [2] is a yearly take-home, one week long problem solving competition for University students. These problems are _very_ hard, so don't be discouraged by not being able to solve them right away.

[3] and [4] are some of my favorite books with Physics problems from Hungarian authors. The problems have varying difficulty, but they are clearly marked in this regard. There are separate hints and full solutions.

[1] https://www.komal.hu/verseny/feladatok.e.shtml [2] https://ortvay.elte.hu/main.html [3] https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/physics/gener... [4] https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/physics/gener...

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

#42

Post by chongli »

indutny wrote: post #17
perczel wrote: post #13

I thought I would also add my two cents, though there have been many excellent responses already. I recently defended my PhD in Physics (MIT '18). First of all - great idea! It is never too late to learn math and physics! In fact, with hard work and commitment, anybody can muster them to a high level. (1) Reading =/= understanding in math and physics. You understand a topic only if you can solve the problems. (2) Wor…

In addition to said here: * https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2016/8/13/so-you-want-to-l... There are plenty of textbooks and lecture notes available online and that article links to most of the popular choices. Make sure to choose correct order of topics to avoid getting stuck!

Wow, thanks for the link! What an incredible resource! It’s really a shame that she had to become famous for being mistreated, rather than for writing such a helpful post as this.

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

#43

Post by giu »

kkaranth wrote: post #16
gjstein wrote: post #10

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 b…

This sounds interesting! Could you talk a bit more about what sources you used to find problems and learn from that translated well to this approach?

The Applications chapter in the "Introduction to High Performance Scientific Computing" book [0] (it's freely available as a PDF) has some chapters dedicated to relevant computational physics problems, i.e., Molecular Dynamics, N-body problems, and Monte Carlo methods (e.g., for approximating integrals).

The book has been posted on HN in the past [1]

[0] http://pages.tacc.utexas.edu/~eijkhout/Articles/EijkhoutIntr...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19827993

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

#44

Post by Quiark »

lidHanteyk wrote: post #25

Everybody recommending Feynman would do well to remember his attitude towards women. Instead, here's a few hours of Susskind on general relativity [0], string theory [1], and quantum mechanics [2]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD9DDFBDC338226CA [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA2FDCCBC7956448F [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA27CEA1B8B27EB67

People can have different opinion on whether Feynman needs to be condemned or not

BUT I can stand behind recommending Susskind!

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

#45

Post by dave_sullivan »

gjstein wrote: post #10

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 b…

I've been taking a similar approach and pursuing this topic by getting into Computational Fluid Dynamics and understanding physics in code first, then trying to bridge the code to the more rigorous mathematical representation.

This is after I tried reading a bunch of physics books and, while interesting, I couldn't really get my head around "Ok, so how would I program something like that?"

But then there's this, you might find it interesting, it helped me understand how everything fits together a lot more: https://github.com/barbagroup/CFDPython

Also, physics is a big area, so this is just one part, specifically the physics of fluid simulation. But there's a big market behind CFD too, so you could do worse in picking something with some directly practical application.

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

#46

Post by funklute »

longtermd wrote: post #15

Read the Feynman Lectures https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

It's perhaps worth being aware that when Feynman initially gave his course at Caltech, most of the students either did extremely well or completely bombed the exam. The middle ground kinda disappeared. So if you read the Feynman lectures and struggle to understand his perspective from the first few chapters, it may be best to give up sooner than later (and move onto other sources).

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

#47

Post by petargyurov »

commandersaki wrote: post #34
perczel wrote: post #13

I thought I would also add my two cents, though there have been many excellent responses already. I recently defended my PhD in Physics (MIT '18). First of all - great idea! It is never too late to learn math and physics! In fact, with hard work and commitment, anybody can muster them to a high level. (1) Reading =/= understanding in math and physics. You understand a topic only if you can solve the problems. (2) Wor…

Isn't an important aspect of learning Physics is being able to conduct experiments in a lab?

I'm not the original commenter but here's my thoughts.

For reference, I studied theoretical physics up to a bachelor level in university. Despite the "theory" focus I still had to do the same amount of lab work as everyone else. I did not enjoy it. I didn't learn much about the concepts from it.

I did however learn about the importance of visualising and representing data, statistics and so on.

We all learn differently I guess - for me lab work was a chore and that mental barrier probably didn't help me learn what the experiments were designed to teach.

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

#48

Post by stared »

I self-studied physics when I was a high-school student. I read The Feynman Lectures of Physics, and it was a great introduction (especially Vol 1 and 2; Vol 3 gives interesting insights but I wouldn't treat is like a canon of quantum physics). It is accessible online, https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/, so go there and read chapter by chapter the pace you like. AFTER there are plenty of ways to go, but for an overview, it is a masterpiece.

However, make sure you practice your skills. It is very easy to get the impression that one understands something, yet not being able to solve a basic exercise (no matter if it is programming or physics).

For an intro to quantum physics, I gathered some materials "Quantum mechanics for high-school students": https://p.migdal.pl/2016/08/15/quantum-mechanics-for-high-sc...

As you come from a programming background, I really encourage you to write small simulations of some pieces. For problems, it is easy to find books with problems for Olympiad preparation (I have a long list of them but in Polish). Or something like: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20832/is-there-a...

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

#50

Post by jimhefferon »

jacobolus wrote: post #26
perczel wrote: post #13

I thought I would also add my two cents, though there have been many excellent responses already. I recently defended my PhD in Physics (MIT '18). First of all - great idea! It is never too late to learn math and physics! In fact, with hard work and commitment, anybody can muster them to a high level. (1) Reading =/= understanding in math and physics. You understand a topic only if you can solve the problems. (2) Wor…

> (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 scoot…

> being expected to understand it through short-term brute effort

Very true, very true. But I have to give grades.

Sure there are things you can do, like quizzes they take as many times as they want and where you only take the final value. But then people don't complete the work. I can't pass them along to Calc II without knowing 70% of Calc I.

It's a tough question in psychology. I had hoped tech would help with it, but I've not had luck in that direction.

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