fluidistic said:
I'm a bit late to the party. My question is "Do you have any success story Micromass?". I mean by that student(s) who really learned a lot and had a good academic start or so.
I have a success story, but it's not the one you're expecting. :)
Success in this context means a lot of different things to different people. Folks of a variety of ages are here self studying and for a lot of different reasons. I've read posts from retirees, all the way down to twenty somethings and teens.
Myself, I'm in my 40s, my kids are all in high school/university and my career trajectory is basically ballistic now. I started self-study late last year and have been slowly plugging away ever since. What got me going was how helping my kids with their math and physics homework reminded me just how much I enjoyed all this stuff as an engineering student, many years ago.
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, having ~= no life and how I used to joke, only 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 (what a great guy!) in combination from a lot of reading on these 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?? :) So, it's been almost a year now, on his recommendation, I've been working through a text on math proofs and started reading about real analysis (advanced, axiomatic calculus). Also, from a less rigorous perspective, I've brushed up on enough calculus 1 and 2 (which came back fairly quickly, kind of like riding a bicycle actually) to get about 1/4 of the way through the problems in Morin's classical mechanics book. Also, I'm about 1/3 through introductory linear algebra. (I highly recommend to other self studiers having several subjects on the go at the same time. A beauty of self study is that when I start getting bored of one subject, I can just switch to something else. I don't have to worry about an exam in 2 days. :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 and imagining myself single handedly designing the next moon lander, 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 my day job and the best I can do is surf physicsforums for an hour. So I can completely relate to the things micromass' has posted about being things you have to stay strong in the face of.
I suspect those who are interested mainly in the pay off and less in the intellectual journey are the ones who struggle most. I imagine 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. For my personal self study effort, this is what success looks like.p.s. I loved the goals that andrewkirk set for himself earlier in this thread. Paraphrasing:
- understand the derivation of Newton's gravitational law as an approximation of Einstein's general relativity equations.
- understand the derivation of the equations that describe a hydrogen atom and its electron orbitals.
- understand the proof of the Jordan Curve Theorem.
- understand the proof of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
Seeing these has made me realize that it's time to take my initial vaguely formulated goals and be more specific!
