6 ms·

How to become a good theoretical physicist

82 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

jeffhwang 4y ago
Thank you for sharing this post! At first glance I was surprised the page was so short and had so few concrete suggestions. Then…I found the “Next” button and saw how much content there was!
analog31 4y ago
>>> I had the extreme luck of having excellent teachers around me. That helps one from running astray. >>> More than rudimentary intelligence is assumed to be present, because ordinary students can master this material only when assisted by patient teachers. I can't comment on my intelligence per se without being either self promoting or self deprecating. ;-) But I'm indebted to having good teachers for getting me through college math and physics, and for a professor to teach me how to do research. Working against whatever intelligence I possessed, was my lack of organization and focus, and the structure of the academic environment was vital for me. Oddly enough, there were other things that I learned easily on my own such as electronics and programming. So I can't say that all things need to be taught by teachers, or even that a single person can follow a single heuristic.
- raydiatian 4y ago
  > But I'm indebted to having good teachers for getting me through college math and physics As a visual learner, I didn’t really understand linear algebra or differential equations until 3Blue1Brown came along through my YouTube. I got through that advanced college maths, but it was all just a pattern matching game back then. Seeing these equations move with life flipped the switch.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
I wonder if the field is so crowded that it is even possible to entertain the idea of becoming a tenured theoretical physicist anymore. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-hard-is-it-to-become-a-professor.772364/ https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-hard-is-it-to-beco... Is Gerard just doing what most academics do in 2022 and trying to churn out more, regardless of whether they are needed or could get a job?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- elashri 4y ago
  Actually this is a slightly updated version of the page. He had this probably since the days old web 1.0 [1] [1] https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html
JBits 4y ago
This a good resource with lots of nice links but while I can see something like a syllabus helping beginners see an overall direction, I don't think this site encourages the right approach to learning physics. I not keen on telling everyone to learn every topic presented or else they 'fail'. He's telling people they have to reproduce his entire physics education exactly as he did which I don't think is suitable for people learning on their own. If you're a self taught programmer you probably didn't learn by finding a university's syllabus and trying to replicate it. Trying to reproduce a university's syllabus seems to me an unreasonable goal and I worry that Hooft's list encourages people to gain a shallow understanding with little understanding. My main take aways from my university education was that most modules truly wished to teach a new way of seeing things or teach skills in manipulating new objects. Analysis is a good example: simply going through theorems and proofs isn't the goal, it's to learn the skills needed to write them, understand the mathematical logic and gain intuition. Another important thing is that science is both broad and deep, despite having common topics, and this list simply doesn't convey this. A learner is much better off using what they find interesting and needed as a guide. It's fine if you don't learn one particular topic or approach something in one particular way because all studying will teach transferable skills. I'd expect someone who's said taught to have more limited time compared to an undergraduate, so I think focusing is fine and potentially necessary.
- tayo42 4y ago
  > If you're a self taught programmer you probably didn't learn by finding a university's syllabus and trying to replicate it. I actually did this. A cs degree has like 6 or 8 dedicated computer classes when you break it down. Everything else is like Gen eds and math. It's pretty much algorithms and ds, maybe assembly and operating systems. Then some elective classes.
- raydiatian 4y ago
  I get where you’re coming from, but the website intro quite literally clarified its audience as being the group of people that want to replicate his education. This website isn’t about Jesus teaching a man to fish, it’s Captain Ahab advertising for Ishmael-types mental enough to join his crew for Moby Dick’s skull.
bmitc 4y ago
“Read everything” is not really a game plan for anything. Most of the suggested topic lists to anemic to be useful. And I have looked at the suggested books before and find them uninspiring. For example, there are ton of special relativity and general relativity books missing from the relevant lists that I’d recommend. (I know because I’ve collected them in hopes of finally learning the material well. I like differential geometry, and it’s a life goal to fully understand general relativity.)
codebolt 4y ago
I still remember how dumbfounded I was as a physics undergrad the first time I worked through the derivation of the wave equation of light from Maxwell's Laws. There are so many beautiful, awe-inspiring and existentially important ideas in physics that I wish more people could appreciate. Happy to see someone (especially someone so accomplished as prof t'Hooft) attempting to make them accessible for anyone with sufficient motivation and an internet connection.
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  For those curious but with less ambition (t'Hooft's syllabus is pretty wild for people who don't actually want to work in the field) I'd recommend Leonard Susskind's Theoretical Minimum series. It's a lecture series recorded at Stanford, available for free on Youtube. There's even one or two books by now I believe that cover classical and quantum mechanics. The video lectures go all the way to the standard model, general relativity, cosmology and even some string theory - all of it presented in a way that people with upper high-school or lower undergrad level math knowledge should be able to follow.
  - kwoff 4y ago
    Three books (classical mechanics, quantum mech., and special relativity + classical field theory) and a 4th one on general relativity coming next year.
- BoGoToTo 4y ago
  I remember the very moment in my first year of phys undergrad when it clicked for me that what I was learning in my ODE, lin-alg, and classical mechanics were all related. It was like this 'holy shit it all makes sense' moment.
dsqrt 4y ago
This is interesting, but all of the links I tried were broken or led to broken pages. Unfortunately, with the widespread use of LMSs a lot of useful material is now behind University firewalls.
- foooobaba 4y ago
  I noticed this as well, but the Way Back Machine can help with this! Just paste your broken link into it to go back in time. https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/
martincmartin 4y ago
I'm trying to give myself an undergraduate education in math and/or physics this way. When I study a subject, here's what I'd ideally need: 1. Explanation of the subject. Could be videos or textbook. 2. Problems to work on. Much like learning guitar, you have to learn math and physics by doing. 3. Feedback on my solutions. Did I solve it right, or did I have some fundamental misunderstanding? Also, when I'm stuck, it can be useful for someone to look at it and say "here's where you went wrong." 4. Community and deadlines. It's easy to put off the next lesson/chapter without those. We talk about students with "sufficient motivation," but motivation isn't a fixed thing, and having a community and deadlines can really push up motivation. A web page or video can explain a subject. A textbook will have problems to work on. But feedback, community and deadlines are something you get from a University class or a MOOC. And there are precious few MOOCs for even 3rd or 4th year undergraduate topics.

82 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

Thank you for sharing this post! At first glance I was surprised the page was so short and had so few concrete suggestions. Then…I found the “Next” button and saw how much content there was!

analog31 4y ago

>>> I had the extreme luck of having excellent teachers around me. That helps one from running astray. >>> More than rudimentary intelligence is assumed to be present, because ordinary students can master this material only when assisted by patient teachers. I can't comment on my intelligence per se without being either self promoting or self deprecating. ;-) But I'm indebted to having good teachers for getting me through college math and physics, and for a professor to teach me how to do research. Working against whatever intelligence I possessed, was my lack of organization and focus, and the structure of the academic environment was vital for me. Oddly enough, there were other things that I learned easily on my own such as electronics and programming. So I can't say that all things need to be taught by teachers, or even that a single person can follow a single heuristic.

raydiatian 4y ago
> But I'm indebted to having good teachers for getting me through college math and physics As a visual learner, I didn’t really understand linear algebra or differential equations until 3Blue1Brown came along through my YouTube. I got through that advanced college maths, but it was all just a pattern matching game back then. Seeing these equations move with life flipped the switch.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

I wonder if the field is so crowded that it is even possible to entertain the idea of becoming a tenured theoretical physicist anymore. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-hard-is-it-to-become-a-professor.772364/ https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-hard-is-it-to-beco... Is Gerard just doing what most academics do in 2022 and trying to churn out more, regardless of whether they are needed or could get a job?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
elashri 4y ago
Actually this is a slightly updated version of the page. He had this probably since the days old web 1.0 [1] [1] https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html

JBits 4y ago

This a good resource with lots of nice links but while I can see something like a syllabus helping beginners see an overall direction, I don't think this site encourages the right approach to learning physics. I not keen on telling everyone to learn every topic presented or else they 'fail'. He's telling people they have to reproduce his entire physics education exactly as he did which I don't think is suitable for people learning on their own. If you're a self taught programmer you probably didn't learn by finding a university's syllabus and trying to replicate it. Trying to reproduce a university's syllabus seems to me an unreasonable goal and I worry that Hooft's list encourages people to gain a shallow understanding with little understanding. My main take aways from my university education was that most modules truly wished to teach a new way of seeing things or teach skills in manipulating new objects. Analysis is a good example: simply going through theorems and proofs isn't the goal, it's to learn the skills needed to write them, understand the mathematical logic and gain intuition. Another important thing is that science is both broad and deep, despite having common topics, and this list simply doesn't convey this. A learner is much better off using what they find interesting and needed as a guide. It's fine if you don't learn one particular topic or approach something in one particular way because all studying will teach transferable skills. I'd expect someone who's said taught to have more limited time compared to an undergraduate, so I think focusing is fine and potentially necessary.

tayo42 4y ago
> If you're a self taught programmer you probably didn't learn by finding a university's syllabus and trying to replicate it. I actually did this. A cs degree has like 6 or 8 dedicated computer classes when you break it down. Everything else is like Gen eds and math. It's pretty much algorithms and ds, maybe assembly and operating systems. Then some elective classes.
raydiatian 4y ago
I get where you’re coming from, but the website intro quite literally clarified its audience as being the group of people that want to replicate his education. This website isn’t about Jesus teaching a man to fish, it’s Captain Ahab advertising for Ishmael-types mental enough to join his crew for Moby Dick’s skull.

bmitc 4y ago

“Read everything” is not really a game plan for anything. Most of the suggested topic lists to anemic to be useful. And I have looked at the suggested books before and find them uninspiring. For example, there are ton of special relativity and general relativity books missing from the relevant lists that I’d recommend. (I know because I’ve collected them in hopes of finally learning the material well. I like differential geometry, and it’s a life goal to fully understand general relativity.)

codebolt 4y ago

I still remember how dumbfounded I was as a physics undergrad the first time I worked through the derivation of the wave equation of light from Maxwell's Laws. There are so many beautiful, awe-inspiring and existentially important ideas in physics that I wish more people could appreciate. Happy to see someone (especially someone so accomplished as prof t'Hooft) attempting to make them accessible for anyone with sufficient motivation and an internet connection.

sigmoid10 4y ago
For those curious but with less ambition (t'Hooft's syllabus is pretty wild for people who don't actually want to work in the field) I'd recommend Leonard Susskind's Theoretical Minimum series. It's a lecture series recorded at Stanford, available for free on Youtube. There's even one or two books by now I believe that cover classical and quantum mechanics. The video lectures go all the way to the standard model, general relativity, cosmology and even some string theory - all of it presented in a way that people with upper high-school or lower undergrad level math knowledge should be able to follow.
- kwoff 4y ago
  Three books (classical mechanics, quantum mech., and special relativity + classical field theory) and a 4th one on general relativity coming next year.
BoGoToTo 4y ago
I remember the very moment in my first year of phys undergrad when it clicked for me that what I was learning in my ODE, lin-alg, and classical mechanics were all related. It was like this 'holy shit it all makes sense' moment.

dsqrt 4y ago

This is interesting, but all of the links I tried were broken or led to broken pages. Unfortunately, with the widespread use of LMSs a lot of useful material is now behind University firewalls.

foooobaba 4y ago
I noticed this as well, but the Way Back Machine can help with this! Just paste your broken link into it to go back in time. https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/

martincmartin 4y ago

I'm trying to give myself an undergraduate education in math and/or physics this way. When I study a subject, here's what I'd ideally need: 1. Explanation of the subject. Could be videos or textbook. 2. Problems to work on. Much like learning guitar, you have to learn math and physics by doing. 3. Feedback on my solutions. Did I solve it right, or did I have some fundamental misunderstanding? Also, when I'm stuck, it can be useful for someone to look at it and say "here's where you went wrong." 4. Community and deadlines. It's easy to put off the next lesson/chapter without those. We talk about students with "sufficient motivation," but motivation isn't a fixed thing, and having a community and deadlines can really push up motivation. A web page or video can explain a subject. A textbook will have problems to work on. But feedback, community and deadlines are something you get from a University class or a MOOC. And there are precious few MOOCs for even 3rd or 4th year undergraduate topics.