61–70 of 73 posts
Why this rather than Motion Mountain? https://www.motionmountain.net/
Pointing to someone else's comments that advised against it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201037
I no longer regret that it has not yet made it to the top of my TBR stack (and is being removed instead).
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Conservation of energy is simply the invariance of a system to translation in time: the system shows the same time evolution from a well defined starting state regardless of whether that state exists at a time t or a time t+t' with an arbitrary t'. This is one application of Noether's theorem. This is an example of a topic that unstructured self study would likely skip. But it is included in every properly structured…
I suppose it depends on what you mean by unstructured (vs. the original claim of self-study). e.g. my method of self-study was generally to find course requirements for a degree program, find corresponding course descriptions and syllabi, find the relevant books, course notes, and/or video lectures and proceed through those. e.g. I did formal study of basic physics in an engineering program, but Noether's theorem was…
I have no idea why these sorts of posts are popular. Past college you're not going to learn physics by trying to self-study an entire university course. The best way to learn is just to pick a small part of physics you'd like to learn (preferably related to your job), i.e. how GPS work or some fluid mechanics etc... Then learn the physics you need for that. Knowledge accumulation can't be organized in a straight line…
I personally recomend Halliday as an everything important in Undergrad thats not Theoretical Physics book. Use that in conjunction with your favorite Flavor of Math for Scientists and Engineers book. And you get a pretty wide understanding of Physics.
I think engineering curriculums “stop short” on mathematics just as it starts becoming interesting, more generalized and before connections start becoming easy to see and remember. Math is often handled as a bag of tricks.
A lot of engineers would do well to review mathematics at a deeper level than their undergrad days, and that can mean hitting up real analysis, abstract algebra and other topics from scratch in a proof theoretic way.
Once that mathematical fluency is achieved, it becomes possible to ingest other topics at higher levels of sophistication, IMHO.
I have no idea why these sorts of posts are popular. Past college you're not going to learn physics by trying to self-study an entire university course. The best way to learn is just to pick a small part of physics you'd like to learn (preferably related to your job), i.e. how GPS work or some fluid mechanics etc... Then learn the physics you need for that. Knowledge accumulation can't be organized in a straight line…
Of course I've never used it and it's gone again
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> Past college you're not going to learn physics by trying to self-study an entire university course And why not? Because humans' brains stop working after they graduate from colleges? Most college students don't work that hard .
My brain only started working after college.
"Solving problems is the only way to understand physics."
This is key! If you have the discipline to follow through on this, then learning via self-study is possible.
If you don't have the time or determination to do that (which is hard, by the way), the other option is basically to pursue "Physics appreciation" via popular science books (some of which are mentioned in the post). You will not have achieved understanding of physics, but you will have an appreciation for it, which is not a bad thing either. (But do not confuse the two.)
I personally recomend Halliday as an everything important in Undergrad thats not Theoretical Physics book. Use that in conjunction with your favorite Flavor of Math for Scientists and Engineers book. And you get a pretty wide understanding of Physics.
It really depends on what the individual goal actually is. I think engineering curriculums “stop short” on mathematics just as it starts becoming interesting, more generalized and before connections start becoming easy to see and remember. Math is often handled as a bag of tricks. A lot of engineers would do well to review mathematics at a deeper level than their undergrad days, and that can mean hitting up real anal…
I still couldn't Mathematically proof anything if a gun were held against my head. I however do apreciate the precise language of math, which I greatly enjoy for describing problems and solutions with incredible precision and little room for interpretation.
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energy = frequency of angular rotation in the complex plane of a wavefunction.
This is new to me (thanks, I'll investigate) and it's the kind of things the books of Physics at University (Computer Science) was full of, completely detached from real world experience. Then there was the book of exercises to prepare for the exams. Sometimes finding the right way to go from theory to calculations was a puzzle in its own. I guess that they were almost the very same books they used at the Physics dep…