Can Philosophy Background Enhance Self-Study in Physics?

[Rollo]

How did you find PF?

via google searches around physics-related topics

Hi everyone. I'm self-studying physics: basically I studied philosophy at university and still read quite a bit, I got interested in the philosophy of physics about 2 years ago, then realized I needed to know more physics to get into this literature properly. Formally speaking I only did physics to UK GCSE and Maths to Alevel. I've gone through Susskind's Theoretical Minimum books, supplemented my maths with an online course on Linear Algebra and a lot of youtube lectures on vector and tensor calculus, and am currently working through Alex Maloney's online GR lectures and Sean Carroll's textbook... (in general I have contributed to the economy around physics by buying quite a lot of books, many of which I buy then realize are not what I need!)

I plan to do enough GR to follow the derivation of and understand the precession of Mercury, redshift, and Schwarzschild solution... then not sure what I'll do next...

 

[jedishrfu]

Welcome to PF!

Black hole physics is pretty edgy. Kip Thorne has put out a couple of books on the subject. His latest one was called The Science of Interstellar where they get into black hole physics concepts like how photons will orbit the hole in certain ways.

You’ll also be moving toward understanding the dichotomy between Quantum Mechanics and GR And attempts to unify the two theories.

Here's a recent article from Quanta magazine on black hole physics and holograms that might peak your interest:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/holo...n-to-black-hole-information-paradox-20191119/

 

[Rollo]

Many thanks! I shall read the article :)