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Best Place For Curious 40-Year-Old To Learn Physics?

boloboffin

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I've gotten a itch to retread the path of high school physics and more. It's been ages since high school and I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how best to go through the learning, being this old.

I've ordered a course on Calculus from The Teaching Company because people are raving about it and it looks very nice. I figure I can find great learning modules online to work through calc problems and the like.

But I don't like the look of the Physics courses they have there. Is there a recommended book I should pick up? Or an audit at a local university? Dallas has several.
 
boloboffin said:
I've gotten a itch to retread the path of high school physics and more. It's been ages since high school and I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how best to go through the learning, being this old.

I've ordered a course on Calculus from The Teaching Company because people are raving about it and it looks very nice. I figure I can find great learning modules online to work through calc problems and the like.

But I don't like the look of the Physics courses they have there. Is there a recommended book I should pick up? Or an audit at a local university? Dallas has several.
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The fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene is probably the best book I have ever read, though it falls more into "popular science" rather than "school physics". Still, it's well worth a read. :)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fabric-Cosm...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240864813&sr=8-1
 
Oh, look, I need trignometry first. Another one from the vaults. :D

Thanks, folks. Sorry for the duplicate thread.
 
Personally, I'd steer clear of any book that's "...for Dummies" or "The Complete Idiot's Guide to..." Not that there might be some viable information there, just that I find the series titles insulting.
 
I guess a lot of the answer would depend on what you want to know about physics and at what mathematical level you want to be able to describe the phenomena.

A great conceptual physics textbook (basic algebra) that is used in high schools and colleges across the country is Paul Hewitt's Conceptual Physics. I know that a lot of my students in the calculus-based course get quite a lot out of Hewitt's book as well. If you're looking for a 1st year engineering level physics text (that is, calculus based,) Halliday and Resnick's Fundamentals of Physics is good. MIT also has posted a large number of lectures on Youtube, and including the entire mechanics course. (Search for MIT classical mechanics there and you can find dozens of lectures.)
 
alfaniner said:
Personally, I'd steer clear of any book that's "...for Dummies" or "The Complete Idiot's Guide to..." Not that there might be some viable information there, just that I find the series titles insulting.
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Absolutely . . .

However, I checked out Complete Idiot's Guide to Algebra (W. Michael Kelly) from my local library and found it to be one of the best books of its type. I got tired of renewing the loan and bought it along with Complete Idiot's Guide to Calculus , same author.

It does take a lot to get past the titles, but the quality of these 2 books makes up for it.

:eggunsure: Back in the '80's maybe early 90's any article in Scientific American on quantum and high energy physics was extremely satisfying, is it my imagination or does it seem that Scientific American is no longer worth reading?


C.
 
Camwe_R. said:
Back in the '80's maybe early 90's any article in Scientific American on quantum and high energy physics was extremely satisfying, is it my imagination or does it seem that Scientific American is no longer worth reading?
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Part of it is probably (hopefully!) that you've learned a good bit since then and so what seemed highly scientific at the time does not as much today. I quit subscribing about a decade ago though because I felt like they were either going with the simplest, most pop-culture science they could find or rehashing the same stuff over and over again (dinosaurs over and over again. good grief.) I know exactly what you're talking about, but I don't have any evidence regarding whether it was me that changed or the magazine.
 
I find Sci-Am very satisfying when they cover a theme they do perhaps better than anyone - the Evolution issue was terrific.

I'm well read and I read it cover to cover and learned quite a bit..

http://www.sciam.com/sciammag/?contents=2009-01

This article for instance was excellent.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=evolution-in-the-everday-world

I think the general availability of science info in pubs like Nature has pushed the Sci-Am readership a bit into the popular zone but that's a good thing in my view.
 
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Thanks, one and all, for the suggestions. I would like to recommend the calculus course I ordered from the Teaching Company (mentioned in the OP). I'm six lectures in and enjoying it tremendously. I was describing it to people as calculus without too much emphasis on the math (hah!), but it really does dig down into the math to illustrate the points. And it's quite nice to be able to follow it!

Although I'm a little sad that I couldn't have followed it like this back in high school, or at least had a bit more awareness of why it might be useful, etc. I could see myself making this a career now if I could have followed it like this back then. Ah, well, regrets.
 
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