Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Cooking, Airbnb, Uber, working independently, pursuing physics seriously.

Physics in particular has been oddly life changing. At some point I think we all look for some purpose or meaning in life. I found it in discovering how little I truly understood about our universe and how bizarre and illogical a universe we truly live in. The mystery and intrigue of our universe leaves me with that child like enthusiasm and interest for discovering ever more.

I mean understanding something relatively simple like time dilation, and its implications, is something that is sufficient to upset one's entire view of the universe. Or even very simple things that we all learn in high school but mostly take for granted such as the beautiful interaction in energy conversion and conservation - and again the implications of such. On that topic the nature of energy itself. Could most people describe energy to a person with no knowledge of physics? And then you can start getting into truly bizarre things which I suppose is an appropriate synonym for quantum mechanics. And this is all just a random sampling of one specific area. Understanding things on a deeper level, and the interaction between all of our physical systems - it just creates a very interesting and exciting universe that I'm happy to simply seek to learn more of. Prior to pursuing physics more seriously, I did not have any clue how little I knew. And it's the sort of subject where the more I learn the more I understand how little I know. Fun stuff!

How did you go about learning this?

I have had Feyman's lectures sitting on my bookshelf for well over a year now, and hope it won't always be in my "someday" bucket.

I had the same thing in that it was always an issue of motivation. Try to find something to draws you in. For me this was special relativity and its implications. Time dilation in particular felt like something that could not be what it seemed after covering the basics using Wiki/YouTube/etc. So I picked up an introductory book on it. I'd highly recommend Spacetime Physics: Introduction to Special Relativity by Taylor/Wheeler. It's extremely well written and just as importantly has plenty of problems to test your understanding. And it was even more fascinating, and bizarre, than I initially thought. From there everything becomes much easier to get into simply because of that intrinsic motivation of awe and wonder.

After that I turned to more 'big picture' stuff to try to at least get a survey of the breadth of knowledge. Like you mention the Feynman Lectures are great for this. You can also find them online [1] which may be more convenient. "A Brief History of Time" is also a phenomenal big picture look at cosmology, which is my current primary interest.

Perhaps the best resource of all, and what I'm currently working through, is Leonard Susskind's "The Theoretic Minimum." I first saw this as a book. It's essentially a physics overview intended for those with a solid mathematical background, but without much formal education in physics. The book is excellent, an even better resource for this is the site [2] for it. It has extensive coverage and lectures on all major topics. The only downside is the lack of questions or material to test your understanding.

Ultimately, I think the most important thing is to find something that draws you in. From there everything is easy. Take a weekend sometime and really dig into something that fascinates you. Time dilation in general, the twin paradox, black holes and their funkiness at the event horizon, the two slit experiment in quantum mechanics, etc. These are all things with massive amounts of information available that can really draw you in.

[1] - http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ [2] - http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses

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