Teaching yourself...

[maru]

I was walking around yesterday and just recalled that I wanted to learn physics. Like, beyond watching YouTube videos and feeling philosophical awe, I wanted to get an undergraduate understanding of physics.

I figured that doing structured learning for myself worked pretty good -- I really like making checklists and all. I tend to design syllabi by quizzing internet, language models, etc. on the canonical resource and potential supplementary readings and then talk through readings with language models, too. I guess in a sense it's a really good time to learn alone, but you have to have a mild skepticism on the internal logic of the model and whether you can trust its own assessment of your learning.

How do you go about learning new stuff outside your field? Also, if you know physics, how's this?

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Main textbooks:
- "University Physics" by Young and Freedman (13-15th?)
- "Feynman Lectures on Physics"

Year 1
- [ ] Introductory Calculus
- "Calculus Made Easy" - Silvanus Thompson
- Main understanding necessary is derivatives, integrals and slopes, which show up immediately in mechanics (velocity etc)
- [ ] Classical Mechanics
- Feynman 1 ch. 1-4 (Basic Physics, Spacetime, Newton's Laws)
- [ ] Electricity and Magnetism
- Feynman 1 ch. 8-10, 2 ch. 1-5 (Conservation of Energy; Electromagnetism Foundations)

Year 2
- [ ] Waves, Oscillations and Optics
- Feynman 1 ch. 38-42 (Harmonic Oscillator and Waves), 39-45 (Optics)
- [ ] Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
- Feynman 1 ch. 44-46 (Thermodynamics)
- [ ] Mathematical Methods for Physics (differential equations, linear algebra)
- [ ] Advanced E&M

Year 3
- [ ] Quantum Mechanics (Introduction)
- Feynman 3 ch. 1-4 (Quantum principles), ch. 7-8 (Uncertainty Principle)
- [ ] Classical Mechanics (Lagrangian, Hamiltonian)
- [ ] Modern Physics (atomic structure, nuclear physics)
- [ ] Computational Physics

Year 4
- [ ] Quantum Mechanics
- Feynman 3 ch. 18-19 (Symmetry in Physical Law)
- [ ] Solid State Physics
- [ ] Astrophysics and/or Particle Physics (elective)

[Brigantia]

For teaching myself new things, I must admit, I don't necessarily think I've a great knack for it. Generally I will try to set out some structured ideas, and break down the goal into smaller objectives like you yourself has done.

Often time, I think it's best to learn by doing, at least for me, and in part this requires a project. I can struggle quite extensively with motivation and so a general "I need to learn X" can often lead to many months passing with no progress. If instead I try to focus on an actual project or end goal that as a side requirement leads to learning X (or some part of it), I often make much more progress.

It's been just over two months since you posted this thread, how is your progress so far on this self teaching? Anything you've discovered and wish to share? Is it going how you hoped it would?

[maru]

It's been just over two months since you posted this thread, how is your progress so far on this self teaching? Anything you've discovered and wish to share? Is it going how you hoped it would?

Actually, a related problem appeared — my own capacity to take up new projects from whole cloth and then to need to sequence them. That is to say, I know I should learn physics at some point, but I've had a pre-existing syllabus of books and games I planned out in February I'm currently working through (and making good progress on!)

And then recently my girlfriend implied-dared me to read all of Proust's In Search of Lost Time which is almost certainly going to take at least half a year ... so my order lately is to get through my syllabus, maybe a book here and there that grabs immediate attention, work on this, then okay maybe then we can focus on physics in detail for a little bit...

As for the books I'm reading now, I'm doing a very obvious thing lately that I should've done from the beginning: I write my thoughts on a book in my Obsidian database when I'm marking them as read. I dump annotations if I literally read it, but for audiobooks I find that my own summary of the book will end up helping it stick tremendously.

[Brigantia]

Fascinating that you sequence your projects and tasks. How do you determine which order to put them in? What takes priority?

[maru]

Fascinating that you sequence your projects and tasks. How do you determine which order to put them in? What takes priority?

Well, in the case of physics, it's something I wish I learned instead of going all in on the humanities from a young age; but it has little direct relevance to my life, so it's lower priority.

For what I'm doing now -- I accumulated a backlog over a few years, and I took the most pertinent "branches" of the backlog and staged them together, so that feels like it comes first. Otherwise, what seems relevant professionally (and if not professionally, then socially) to be done sooner is done sooner.

What about you? What's the project right now?

[Brigantia]

I've a lot of projects currently. I tend to set reminders on my phone to do things, work on things. Often times I'll end up pushing them back for quite a while but they remain and eventually I do get around to actually completing a lot of them.

Right now I've got a few things I want to work on from more writing to making videos even. I have been able to do quite a bit of writing but the videos haven't started yet because while I have the ideas I know very little on the technical side and don't have any decent equipment for it.

I do find having a lot of projects ongoing helps me however. It means there is generally always something to keep me busy even if it can sometimes lead to a kind of stalling while I try to figure out what is most pressing. That issue is why I enquired about your method of sequencing.