Teaching myself physics, is this a futile attempt?

[liam]

I spent most of my high school and college years trying to do everything, all the while accomplishing nothing. Now that I've accepted I can only do so much I'm less stressed out. I still have many of the possessions that tell the tale of a fool who thought he could master everything; they're reminders, I guess.

It isn't really a trying to do everything affair, I don't really have that much to do otherwise and it'll probably be a summer holidays thing I think the biggest issue there would be is the complexity of it and the amount of work I'd need to do. Alas, we are all disposed to try and do as much as possib

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I spent most of my high school and college years trying to do everything, all the while accomplishing nothing. Now that I've accepted I can only do so much I'm less stressed out. I still have many of the possessions that tell the tale of a fool who thought he could master everything; they're reminders, I guess.

It isn't really a trying to do everything affair, I don't really have that much to do otherwise and it'll probably be a summer holidays thing I think the biggest issue there would be is the complexity of it and the amount of work I'd need to do. Alas, we are all disposed to try and do as much as possibl

[Cato]

I have to recommend Roger Penrose's The Road To Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe as a guide for your endeavor. He spends much of his preface providing an explanation why he thought the inclusion of the underlying mathematics critical to his book. I also like the organization.

Each chapter has its own notes pages. The bibiliography is 35 pages long. Penrose also includes, where possible, article id's to be used at arXiv.org. arXiv.org: " Open access to 762,411 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics"

[goddamnit]

There are free, whole physics courses from top notch universities on the internet.

http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/p...ourseRev/1

https://www.coursera.org/course/qcomp

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-...-lectures/

I only took a few physics courses, so I would prioritize the responses of others if they contest this, but reading the textbook(s) and doing all the problems is enough to do well on exams. Most students do not read every chapter from start to finish. They attend lectures and do part of the reading assignments. If you read all the chapters of a textbook, you would be ahead of most students. You might not be able to access all the expensive lab equipment a local school has, but I am sure you can still learn most of the concepts that the lab is intended to demonstrate.

[Tobie]

I have to recommend Roger Penrose's The Road To Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe as a guide for your endeavor. He spends much of his preface providing an explanation why he thought the inclusion of the underlying mathematics critical to his book. I also like the organization.

Each chapter has its own notes pages. The bibiliography is 35 pages long. Penrose also includes, where possible, article id's to be used at arXiv.org. arXiv.org: " Open access to 762,411 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics"

I've got that book, the contents look intimidating, to say the least.

[Cato]

Just wanted to share another free resource. Not just physics.

http://www.khanacademy.org