I personally spoke with several programmers who wanted to "study physics". I showed them a copy of COMSOL multiphysics, explained to them that even as trained physicist with years of experience I could probably understand well only 20% of the problems the software can solve, and clarified that the portion of physics you touch on software like that is the tiny tiny part of physics that is used heavily in engineering tasks, maybe 1% of it, the most boring one. All of them without exception backed down.
The second thing you have to understand is that studying physics beyond the college level requires an analytical depth of reasoning that is not usually reached in software engineering and that there are no easy didactical books (in recent years the situation improved a lot though). So you either have to understand difficult stuff or you need a good in person teacher. Not to mention that only the mismatch between different conventions and schools of thought is gonna cost you a lot of your time if you rely on a sparse set of books. It happens a lot that different books use different space/time/unit/normalization/coordinate basis choices and that means you simply cannot copy and paste formulas without understanding their derivation.
That said I would suggest
- going through the exercises of a college level book like Halliday Resnick. Walter Lewin lectures if you can find them are good too.
- watch YouTube videos, some of them are really well made these days
- the theoretical minimum from Leonard susskind is a good set of lectures for advanced theoretical concept in minimal format for people who have some STEM background. A good series of books in the same style is the no-nonsense series from Jakob Schwichtenberg.
- go through the kind of stuff you do in computational physics. Simulations like you find in finite elements solvers are great visually. A lot of other techniques exist for modeling quantum systems, gravitational systems, statistical mechanics... Engineering-level stuff will have good software to back it (Synopsis for optics and semiconductors, Comsol for a holistic approach, Ansys for statics, Cst for antennas, Lumerical for optics,...). Most of those will have open source equivalents of significantly lesser quality. More research level stuff, like from DFT and beyond, will have open source packages that get sparser and sparser until you get to some github repository that a graduate student maintained for their thesis.
[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics
[2] https://www.amazon.com/GRE-Physics-Review-Comprehensive-Subj...
However I would not recommend the Feynman lectures (and, based on the preface, I think Feynman would agree). I've read about a 1/3 of the series and while I have to say they are some of the greatest technical writing in history, they are not the greatest pedagogical material. I do believe everyone should read at least some of the Feynman lectures, just not as a means of learning physics. Much like a good 3blue1brown video, you feel like you're learning a lot... but 6 months later there's just a big empty hole were knowledge used to be.
Based on recommendations I've found I'm currently working through Taylor's Classic Mechanics. My ultimate aim is to get a better grip on Lagrangian mechanics and make use of the plethora of great automatic differentiation tools out there to create some trick simulations of physical processes. So far the book has been fantastic, but I'm not far enough through to be able to give it an unequivocal endorsement.
Of course self learning does miss out on the experimentation portion, but I suspect a software engineer could afford the basic tools to setup a variety of high-school/early undergrad experiments. If you're hankering for something requiring institutional funding level of equipment you should be able to audit a course at your local university.
If you enjoyed it work through Halliday Resnick.
Now you need to do quite a bit of labwork. Some universitys allow you to take/do lab experiments. Do not skip that.
Then you can work through the feynman lectures, to see the stuff from different angles.
This will give you a comprehensive physical understanding. Which is good enough. Missing would 'only' an insane amount of math and theoretical physics.
You should check it out.
hit or miss but is a good anthology of resources
1. Where you're starting from (remember any 8th grade physics?)
2. Where you want to go?
For me, I started with a somewhat faded memory from 8th grade physics, and that was it. I had many goals, but a succinct overall way to say them would be that I wanted to a broad understanding of the subject. I'm not afraid of math but a purely mathematical understanding to me was less important than a conceptual understanding. I wasn't aiming for "physicist" or even "software guy who works on physics code", I just have an insatiable curiosity about the world, and physics opens so much of that. The only goal I had that I didn't get to, was I wanted to understand what gravity is and how it works. Turns out that's a hugely difficult thing. Someday I will try again, but for now I've had to accept that the why behind curvature of space is a bit out of my grasp.
Anyway, this is what I did in the beginning to get started, and recommend (sorry don't remember the things I read later).
I highly recommend starting with the Great Courses. Professor Wolfson is one of my favorites.
1. Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, 2nd Edition: (Wolfson): https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/einstein-s-relativit...
This was a great one to start with because he starts with classical physics and works upward through Einstein, which helped me understand so much.
2. Great Courses, Physics and Our Universe (Wolfson): https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/physics-and-our-univ...
3. Understanding Gravity (Schumacher): https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/black-holes-tides-an...
There are lots of other great courses on the Great Courses as well, those are just the ones I liked the most.
- you get a simplified introduction to statistical mechanics - you learn about thermodynamics - introduction to basic concepts like heat, enthapy, entropy - quantum light effects that explain absorbance, Raman scattering, fluorescence
1) Leon Cooper’s Physics: Structure and Meaning
2) The Feynman Lectures on Physics
My question is- what do you want to do with your Physics knowledge? What’s your goal? Just intellectual curiosity, or something else? Please state that.
Is there any particular area you are interested in?
If you want to BE A PHYSICIST learn a lot of math + work somewhere they do their work. Try to network and find someplace you can be a scientific programmer for a yearish.
If you just want to UNDERSTAND physics, start reading primary sources rather than shit like Wired.
Often there is a type of person that exploits that gap between say, an ARXIV print to going to a conference to going to a journal to being presented at a conference... where then a journalist sits down, observes the presentation, and writes it up, to sound smarter than they are.
I don't like that kind of person.
Hope the above is helpful!