So why am I here?

What got me going was how helping my kids with their math and physics homework reminded me just how much I enjoyed math and physics years ago as an engineering student. Also, things like the confirmation of the Higgs Boson and gravitational waves have been in the news a lot lately and sound fascinating! I’m in my 40s now, the kids are all in high school/university leaving a bit more time to indulge. So I started self-study and have been slowly plugging away ever since.

Lacking background in physics to even know what questions to ask, initially my goals were quite vague. I started out wanting to understand special and general relativity and to make sense of what the Higgs boson really was. I remember the insane pace of my degree program back in the day and having ~= no life. I used to joke, half seriously, that true understanding and intuition of any given course came only mid-way through the follow-on course!! So this time I wanted to take my time and understand what I’m learning, deep in my bones, every step of the way.

micromass from physicsforums in combination from a lot of reading on the forums, was kind enough to help me get started. I thought I did quite a lot of math during my degree but one of the first questions micromass asked was if the math I had done was computational only. I had to stop for a minute to even understand his question! You mean there’s more than one kind?? :) On his recommendation, I got introduced to math proofs and started reading about real analysis (advanced, axiomatic calculus). From a less painstaking and rigorous perspective, I brushed up on enough calculus (which came back fairly quickly, kind of like riding a bicycle actually) to start working through problems in Morin’s classical mechanics book. (Incidentally, I highly recommend to other self studiers having several subjects on the go at the same time. A beauty of self study is not having to worry about an exam in 2 days - when I start losing patience for one subject, I just switch to something else. :D)

But wow - it’s slow going and it’s easy to feel like my goals are infinitely far away. As is common for people who don’t know much about a subject, I grossly underestimated how vast these subjects were and how long they would take to learn. It reminds me of being back in high school, excited for aerospace engineering, imagining myself single handedly designing the next space shuttle, not realizing the less glamorous and highly specialized reality!

The time I’m able to spend on this has been wildly inconsistent. Some weeks I manage only an hour or two. A lot of days I come home pretty brain dead from work and the best I can do is surf physicsforums for an hour. I suspect those who embark on self-study but are interested mainly in the pay off and less in the intellectual journey are the ones who struggle most. I think it’s like learning music. Once you can play, there are rich rewards such as learning new songs, composing or performing. But it can be a tough slog getting to that point and if you aren’t able to appreciate the little rewards along the way, knowing that the big rewards may be a long time coming, then you might not make it through all the practicing of scales and increasingly complex versions of Mary Had a Little Lamb.

That said, like music, this hobby is one that doesn’t have an “end” - there’ll always be something new to learn. And I do love the little eureka moments, and those moments where I make a connection between two topics I’ve been learning about.

Anyways, I’m still happily chugging along.