Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

I was interested in this too as someone who's worked in web apps the last 8-10 years and was super inspired by the SpaceX Falcon Heavy landing (science fiction is now science fact!) I looked into graduate programs, especially those online, and found the JHU Space Systems Engineering program. The prerequisites for THAT program are a year of college Calculus and a year of college Physics. I'm currently taking that, "year", which is really just Physics I and II and Calculus I and II at Thomas Edison State University. They've been doing distance learning for decades.

The courses aren't super cheap, they're around $2,000 each, but having classmates, a mentor, deadlines, and a legit program to structure my learning around has been so helpful. Not to mention that my grades are legit for pre-reqs if I do want to go the full grad school route. I'm almost done with the I level courses and started the II level courses 2/3 of the way through the I.

I think a lot of people on here might say my approach is kind of basic (I see people recommending working differential equations or something to start), but I've found it really enlightening to start from the very beginning and things are starting to get challenging as I get into the second level, especially with Calculus. Maybe if you just looked up Physics I and II and Calc I and II curriculums, and got the textbooks (Conceptual Physics by Paul G Hewitt and Calculus: Early Transcendentals by Robert Smith) you could do a lot of the same exercises.

Hope that's helpful!

If you can find Walter Lewin's courses online, they can get you through the first years of physics.

The main way to learn physics though, on your own or in a program, is by doing problems and labs. You can start by doing the coursework you find for an established class. Another is by working through problems in a text book. As for labs, hacking together what you can is both valuable and rewarding. A few examples are estimating absolute zero, measuring the coefficient of friction, exploring momentum with ball bearings.

A few other things that I have found work for me. First, work towards a goal. Whether that be to calculate the orbit of a planet, understand quantum tunneling, or estimate a dynamic process. The second is to take the time follow thoughts as far as you can, using the social communities and resources available on the web (quora, reddit, etc).

Back in the day I self-studied through MIT OCW, and found it remarkably complete. It's better in quality than what you would get at almost all universities, including MIT itself (!), because only the best lecturers tend to get immortalized on OCW.

Going through the series 8.012, 8.022, 8.03, 8.033, 8.04, 8.044, 8.05, 8.06 will give you the core theoretical knowledge of a physics major. (I assume you already know all the relevant math background.) If you prefer lecture notes, I imagine the best thing is to go through David Tong's lecture notes [0] from start to finish, as these cover almost the entire Cambridge undergraduate curriculum very clearly. If you want textbooks, at least in America, the books one uses for these courses are pretty standardized, and Fowler's blog post lays out these standard choices. For more advanced books, I have a pretty extensive bibliography in the front matter of my personal lecture notes [1].

0: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html 1: https://knzhou.github.io/#lectures

> In addition to the examples in the blog post linked above, you cannot express a mutating getter in Mathematics.

Neither can you express foobarish bamboozles...