So. I’ve always wanted to learn physics.

I know this will sound bizarre to most people.  I went to freakin’ MIT — one of my physics professors as an undergrad won the Nobel Prize the semester after I was in his class.  But I’ve never felt I’ve had a good intuitive grasp of physics, nor studied it to a depth where I felt like I understood it.

A confession: Physics doesn’t come naturally to me.  It’s not intuitive.  (I always end up reducing it to mathematics, and then it makes sense.)  Because physics ran a bit against the grain of my brain, I didn’t study it heavily in college beyond my undergraduate requirements, and I always regretted that.  I’ve always wanted to know more, and felt a bit like the physics world was this fascinating enchanted universe but I’d only ever managed to have my face pressed up to the glass, catching glimpses without being able to be a true party to the wonder.

While I was down with cancer, a college friend of mine gave me a book called The Theoretical Minimum, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky.  He billed it to me as, “for people who have a decent foundational background and know calculus, but who were never able to study physics to the point they wanted to.”  I said, “Hey, that’s me!”

Well, I’ve been reading it, and it’s quite excellent!

To keep myself on track with it, I’m going to blog about a chapter every week or thereabouts.  I apologize if people find these boring — I’ll try to keep them pithy.  I started the book a while ago so hopefully I should be able to keep up with the posts  (in fact, I’m going to write a few of these and buffer them before posting, and then send them up every Saturday or so).

So, these posts will be some commentary on The Theoretical Minimum, whatever I feel like writing about it.  I shall start with the Preface, since it’s quite worth starting with:

As it happens, the Stanford area has a lot of people who once wanted to study physics, but life got in the way.  They had had all kinds of careers but never forgot their one-time infatuation with the laws of the universe.  Now, after a career or two, they wanted to get back into it, at least at a casual level. (p. ix)

This is pretty much exactly me.  Also, I often regret that there aren’t more opportunities for hobby academics — thanks to online endeavors like Coursera and edX, that’s changing, happily, but it can sometimes be hard to find courses that are just that bit beyond the basics.  Especially for more theoretical scientific disciplines.

Okay, now next week — on to the physics!