Exploring Physics: A Student and Autodidact's Journey and Interests

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In summary, Exploring Physics: A Student and Autodidact's Journey and Interests is a personal account of a student's passion for physics and their self-directed learning journey. It explores the challenges and joys of studying physics, as well as the various resources and methods used by the author to deepen their understanding of the subject. The article also highlights the importance of curiosity and critical thinking in the study of physics, and how anyone can become a lifelong learner in this fascinating field.
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ComplexVar89
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Hello. I'm John.

As the title says, I'm both a student and autodidact. How does that work? As a formal student, my degree is entirely online and has lots of math (computational, not proofs-based) in it, but my true love is physics and, to a slightly lesser extent, other scientific disciplines. I can't exactly earn a physics degree online, though, so I have to study that independently. Oh, well.

My favorite areas of physics are relativity (both SR and GR--I cannot see why crackpots want to disprove them!) and cosmology.

I'm also a fiction writer, sometimes. I have a core set of narrow interests I tend to cycle through, to the exclusion of most everything else. No, I am not well-rounded in the least.

Fun fact 01: Reading a paper by Lee Smolin, entitled "The case for background independence" has been influential in helping me decide which areas of beyond-the-standard-model physics I might want to study, if I ever get that far. (It also gave competent voice to some of the gut-level doubts I had after reading certain of the many popular science books out there I've read over the years.)

Fun fact 02: I lurk sometimes and look up stuff mentioned that catches my interest--thus, how I found Smolin's paper.

Observation: As is talked about in Feynman's Tips On Physics, I view myself to be at the bottom third of the class here, but that's not so bad, when I'm in a group as good as this one. :-) At the very least, it means I have a major leg-up on the general population in understanding physics, which is good enough for me.
 
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Welcome to the PF! :smile:
 
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Thank you for the welcome, berkeman.
 
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