Ask HN: How to self-study physics?

I don't know of anybody who's ever learned new stuff from that book. It literally zooms from addition and subtraction to fiber bundles in a few hundred pages. That's simply not enough to pick up anything but the bare intuition, and certainly not enough to do any nontrivial calculations. The only people I know who enjoyed the book at all were those who already knew the stuff in it, but in that case the book was pointless!

My personal recommendations for an undergraduate course in physics (based in large part off of my own undergrad curriculum):

Foundations:

1. Newtonian Mechanics by A.P. French (https://archive.org/details/NewtonianMechanics/mode/2up). This will give you a good foundation for what is to come.

2. Spacetime Physics by Taylor & Wheeler --- first edition if you can find it! It is much, much better than the second! Special relativity is conceptually strange, but mathematically pretty easy, so you can jump right into it after learning Newtonian mechanics. Have a little fun!

3. Electricity & Magnetism by Purcell. This book is a little unusual in that it derives magnetism from the laws of special relativity. This is the more natural approach than just asserting the laws of magnetism since magnetism is fundamentally a relativistic phenomenon.

4. Waves by Crawford. (https://archive.org/details/Waves_371/mode/2up) A bit hard to find in print, but a really excellent textbook. Waves are a fascinating topic because they come up in every area of physics, so a course focused around them has a huge number of applications.

5. Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Griffiths. The best introduction to the topic you will find!

6. Thermal Physics by Kittel & Kroemer. I haven't actually found an introductory book on statistical physics that I'm crazy about, but this one isn't too bad.

That should last you some time. But once you're through with those and are looking for more, then here are some advanced topics:

7. Analytical Mechanics by Hand & Finch. This will teach you advanced Newtonian mechanics --- in particular Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics. There is a chapter on chaotic dynamics towards the end, too. Another option here is Classical Mechanics by Goldstein.

8. Introduction to Electrodynamics by Griffiths. More advanced E&M than Purcell. If you want to go further, then there's always Classical Electrodynamics by Jackson.

9. Principles of Quantum Mechanics by Shankar. This spends more time on the mathematical foundations of QM than Griffiths does and goes into the path integral formalism and touches on relativistic QM towards the end of the book.

10. A First Course in General Relativity by Schutz. There are arbitrarily advanced texts on GR, but I'd recommend starting off with something friendly like Schutz.

11. An Introduction to Elementary Particles by Griffiths. Not super advanced mathematically, but it's a good thing to read over to prepare you for more advanced QFT texts. The first chapter is especially good as a history of the development of particle physics.

12. Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell by Zee.

13. Modern Classical Physics by Thorne & Blandford. This is a tour de force. It's an enormous book but it really touches on everything that is left out by the above books. It covers optics, fluid dynamics, statistical physics, plasma physics, and more. (I'm currently reading through it and have only gotten through 6 chapters, but it's really an incredible textbook.)

14. Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity by Sethna. This is a really fun book, but almost all the material is in the problems.

Finally, and most importantly --- remember that physics is not a spectator sport! You must do problems. A lot of them --- and hard ones, too!

Physicist here.

Since you probably have a good background in optimization, work through problems in:

- Taylor for Classical Mechanics or Goldstein (a bit more advanced) - Griffiths for E/M and Quantum.

For stat. mech. I find the chemists have more intuitive textbooks.

- Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics by Chandler

Ummm, open a physics text book?

I disagree with you. I teach physics. Everyone interested in physics should read the Feynman lectures, but they are neither sufficient or necessary to understand physics. They are merely oomph on top of already good understanding.

Let's imagine physics=boxing. No amount of reading boxing books, or watching boxing videos is going to teach you any boxing. To learn boxing you have to throw 10,000 punches. To learn physics, you need to solve 1000s of questions. That is the necessary and sufficient condition for understanding physics.

Same way one learns software engineering after writing 100s/1000s of programs, not by watching videos of smart people coding (though that can help make you better).