It's a bit like showing someone who wants to learn programming a list of all the popular repositories on Github and explaining that even with years of experienc

It's a bit like showing someone who wants to learn programming a list of all the popular repositories on Github and explaining that even with years of experience as a developer one could only understand 20 % of the code, and that even that is only a tiny part of all software paradigms in existence, maybe 1 %. That's a really negative attitude, I find. Personally I studied physics to the PhD level and I'd say it's absolutely possible to get a good understanding of the fundamentals of modern physics with a few years of dedicated self-study. One probably needs a knack for mathematics as well, which is probably the most difficult part for most developers. I know my way around basic electrodynamics, classical & quantum mechanics, astrophysics, statistical physics, thermodynamics, optics, nanotechnology and a few other areas. I've probably attained expert level knowledge in superconductivity and experimental quantum computing, meaning that I'm able to follow and understand state-of-the-art research and come up with interesting research ideas myself (though I've been out of the game for a decade, so probably I'm a bit out of touch already). I know very few physicists who are experts in more than one domain, but that doesn't mean they don't enjoy learning about other areas of physics as well.