Personal pre-university curriculum

[ΔxΔp≥ћ/2]

Hi guys,

I am a senior in high school intending on becoming a physicist. I would like to know what books/textbooks I should buy and start working on to get ahead in university. I am particularly talking about math books. I have a few goals:

1.Prepare myself for university
2.Have a good knowledge of the subjects that I will learn at university before they are taught
3.Getting into the juicy quantum mechanics math as soon as possible without skipping anything (I think that I would like to make a career out of research in fundamental QM)
4.Be able to do summer research in physics at my university (you can as early as 1st year)

I know that I at least should get books in (I know I must be forgetting subjects):

1.Calculus (I currently have just about no calculus training. Could I benefit from Spivak?)
2.Trig
3.Vectors
4.Algebra

What physics books should I buy?

I am also looking for a QM book that is harder than those I have currently read (mostly a non-mathematical hodge-podge of books with a few chapters on QM).

I have Dirac's QM book as well as Shankar's. These are both too hard for me now.

 

[Brad Barker]

i think a solid introductory level text on calculus-based physics is sufficient.

the halliday, resnick, and krane vol. 1 and 2 even have a bit of special relativity and "modern physics"-level quantum mechanics.

when i was a whipper-snapper, i used another text, but it lacked the extra chapters on QM. (though the friggin' solutions manual had those chapters! what a tease!)


don't forget to spend the necessary time applying for colleges! when i was a senior, i spent all of my time doing homework, "funwork," and watching cartoons. my apps were quite a bit rushed and my selection of schools was not at all strategic.

 

[quasar987]

I think that I would like to make a career out of research in fundamental QM

Read Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics.

 

[ΔxΔp≥ћ/2]

Read Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics.

Although I obviously do not have the education to really tell what is going on, string theory (and unification through playing with numbers) seems like a lot of baloney to me. I will read the book though. I am specifically interested experimentally testable stuff giving us insight into the working of QM, possibly one day providing us enough to unify physics: Serge Haroche, Bose-Einstein condensates, Alain Aspect, maybe looking for quantum effects in space.

don't forget to spend the necessary time applying for colleges! when i was a senior, i spent all of my time doing homework, "funwork," and watching cartoons. my apps were quite a bit rushed and my selection of schools was not at all strategic.

I already know that I will go to the local university. They are known for their physics program. A grad student even talked about me to the QM teacher and I got to meet him. Current research is mostly in optics and includes (I will get to work on this stuff as early as 1st year):
Supraluminal propagation experiments (Canada photonics chair)
Thin Films (Internationally known photonics/thin film group)
Microcavities
Photovoltaics / Electroluminesce
And other cool stuff I won’t mention

I know that there are a lot of threads already about this stuff, but I was unable to find any that allowed me to make any decisions. I am going to read the Feynman lectures and QED, but I would like stuff to set me on the right path before university. I want to read some more complicated QM as soon as possible but I don’t want to gloss over it. I don’t want to be the guy that knows all of QM but fails everything else. From what I see, this means I will need a very good vector textbook, an excellent understanding of calculus, partial derivatives and probably a bunch of stuff I don’t even know exists.

I am interested in buying the Morrison QM books, but will I be able to understand them yet? (So far Shankar and Dirac seem too hard)

 

[The_ArtofScience]

I'm actually trying to learn QM as fast as possible like in your case, except I'm already a freshman at my local U. I was a little frustrated with the pace in my math class (precal) so I was forced to resort to self-studying applied calculus. You could borrow/buy Morris Kline's "Calculus: A Physical and Intuitive Approach" - this book helped me to understand a lot of concepts without too much rigor in calculuations. There's tons of manageable word problems that reinforces what you learn and its actually good enough if you only have a basic trig understanding and some algebra experience.

I just can't wait to learn QM in general. The patience is killing me! Next term I hope I don't kill myself with "Differential Equations & Linear Algebra" Do all you can to learn the materials because time is ticking! (Note: This might not be great advice for everyone)

 

[quasar987]

Although I obviously do not have the education to really tell what is going on, string theory (and unification through playing with numbers) seems like a lot of baloney to me. I will read the book though. I am specifically interested experimentally testable stuff giving us insight into the working of QM, possibly one day providing us enough to unify physics: Serge Haroche, Bose-Einstein condensates, Alain Aspect, maybe looking for quantum effects in space.

I see! I thought you wanted to work on the fundationnal problem of QM from a theoretical point of view. I'm glad that I was wrong because my impressions from reading Smolin is that it is basically impossible to get a job working on that subject. But experimental QM is probably something else! There are more than interesting questions that I don't think the theory has an opinion about. For instance, at which size does an object becomes quamtum-mechanical in its behavior? How is this change happening? Smoothly or dicretely? I read an article once in a popular science magazine that said physicists had succeeded in maintaining a 140-something atoms in a quantum state.

Anyway, good luck to you! I hope you realize your dreams.