Faraday did a lot of "self studying of Physics". He was a book binder who didn't know any Math (had to drop out of school at 13). The reason he got into it was

Faraday did a lot of "self studying of Physics". He was a book binder who didn't know any Math (had to drop out of school at 13). The reason he got into it was not because he read a Physics or Math textbook or worked out math problems, but because some one liked the way he bound books and gave him a ticket to a Humphrey Davy talk at the Royal Institution. Thats all it took to get into Physics. Without him dreaming up his experiments and tinkering away, god knows when Maxwell's equations would have been discovered. Why did we have to wait for a Faraday to show up to do his simple experiments? How come all the natural philosophers and mathematicians of the age, around the whole planet, had not thought to do them? If Faraday had asked that bunch how do I self-study physics the answers wouldn't have been too different to what we see today. Today's version of Faraday could very well be some kid hacking away at some computer game, dreaming up scenarios, exercising imagination and cooking up experiments in the same way Faraday did.