What books or courses will help me learn science?

March 24, 2008 2:35 PM

What books or online courses will best help me learn science and engineering? I'm especially interested in physics, astronomy, general electronics, and computer science.

I've got what I think is a pretty good basic aptitude for science -- I did very well in it in high school -- but avoided taking science or engineering classes, or for that matter any math, through college. Now, 15 years after graduating, I feel that I may have missed my calling.

I'm interested in substantive introductory treatments of the topics -- not just "A Brief History of the Universe" glosses on the big picture, but books or courses that will help me understand what's really going on, from a basic level and building on up. Mind you, I'm not trying to turn myself into a physicist, I just want an understanding that goes beyond the vague fuzzy hand-waving stage.

I've started reteaching myself calculus using Silvanus P. Thompson's Calculus Made Easy, which is fun, and challenging. So I'm not afraid of math, as long as it's explained, or as long as I can figure out where to get an explanation.

posted by dylan20 to education (8 comments total)

MIT's course material is online.

More links for autodidacts.
posted by svolix at 2:38 PM on March 24 [1 favorite]

Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality is essentially a thousand-page primer in mathematical physics written for the layman. He doesn't shy away from the math, as many physics popularizers do, but he presents it as clearly as possible, starting from Euclid and explaining every step. Remarkably well done.
posted by futility closet at 2:46 PM on March 24 [1 favorite]

"The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is 3 slender volumes. Also available in audio, in part or in whole. Start with a set of excerpts called "Six Easy Pieces."
posted by neuron at 3:51 PM on March 24 [2 favorites]

It may be hard to know what pieces of math are important and which are not, so let me give my opinion. The shortest shortcut to physics includes algebraic manipulation, differentiation and integration, and being fluent in these. Had I known how much I'd use these techniques during my education, I would have spent more time practicing them from the very start. Once you understand the principles, do lots of simple exercises, as you did with multiplication.

You'll need more math than that, but as you're not training to be a physicist it may be no use to get great at multi-variable integration and unusual coordinate systems as long as you can get it if you think about it for a while. I think you'll benefit from learning to use these particular techniques without effort though. Whatever physics you read will become much more transparent to you, and I think the same goes for the electrical and mechanical engineering disciplines. Computer science may require a little less calculus but more discrete math.
posted by springload at 3:56 PM on March 24 [1 favorite]

If you're willing to consider textbooks, there are a few standards that are really exceptional, and written at a sophomore level (i.e. you're expected to have an introductory-level grasp of physics, but not much more). If you're just looking to read through them and not solve any problems, I think they might be quite interesting. I'd say they are:

modern physics: Taylor
electricity and magnetism: Purcell
quantum mechanics: Griffiths

They should probably be tackled in that order.
posted by you're a kitty! at 4:21 PM on March 24 [3 favorites]

Get a great foundation of the general science on which everything else builds -- and just a plain damn fine read -- from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
posted by _Mona_ at 6:37 PM on March 24 [2 favorites]

The New Physics For the Twenty-First Century (2006 edition of The New Physics [1992])

Physics for Future Presidents

Feynman's Tips on Physics
posted by lukemeister at 10:21 PM on March 24

Recent post on the blue
posted by Lucie at 10:34 PM on March 24 [1 favorite]