The Theoretical Minimum lecture series on theoretical physics by Leonard Susskind. Covers the basics in a very approachable way. I wish this had been available when I studied physics.

An (maybe) interesting fact is, that in Germany the notion „scientific method“, to my knowledge, is largely unknown. For example, there is no link in the english wikipedia entry you have given to the german wikipedia. When I studied physics in Germany no one ever used that term.

Same in most place in Europe. This is mainly an American name. Because it is _not_ how science works.

Could you elaborate? As an American who hasn't traveled as much as he should, this came as a surprise to me. I always assumed the "scientific method" that we were taught in school was some universal international standard.

Because science does not works by a "scientific method". It work with some really simple things :

- Be sceptical

- Believe the data

- Keep asking questions.

All the rest is just fluff. Most of the time you have experiments before hypothesis. Or an intuition that only match part of it. Or publish some food for though and it will only be proved to be false hundreds of years later. The whole "hypothesis -> experiment -> theory" miss so many things.

From the french wikipedia entry

Très souvent, le terme de « méthode » engage l'idée implicite de son unicité, tant auprès du grand public que de certains chercheurs, qui de surcroît la confondent parfois avec la seule méthode hypothético-déductive. L'étude des pratiques des chercheurs révèle cependant une si grande diversité de démarches et de disciplines scientifiques que l'idée d'une unité de la méthode est rendue très problématique.

Quick and bad translation :

Most of the time, the term "method" push the implicit idea of unicity, to some scientists but also to the public, who also reduce it to the solely "hypothetico-deductive" method. The study of scientists practices reveal a so big diverity of method and scientific fields that the idea of an unicity of the method is highly problematic.

When I was in school "scientific method" wasn’t teached as a separate topic, but more like the result of "osmosis": you are given many examples of how science works and you somehow learn by this the process of science itself. Ok, you are taught how do do proofs in maths and how to do experiments, but no direct reference to a concept like the scientific method.

In the US we do teach about the scientific method as an abstract idea, especially in grade school and high school, but working scientists mostly learn by osmosis here as well. I'd say it serves a role similar to the way finance guys use math models, or musicians use advanced music theory: an idealized description of the way things are done on the ground that you study in school, but rarely use day to day.

I was taught that in a german university (in Experimental Physik), but not the name. I guess it falls under the broader concept of epistemology.

There is some more information available here: https://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/weblog/2015/mulle_objc_a_ne...

There is a free PDF on the nature site, but the paper is also available on arxiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.4437), the first version on the arxiv dates back to 2014. It's strange, but I find the arxiv version much more readable in terms of typesetting than the polished version in nature. Also there are additional appendices in the arxiv version.

Can you provide a link to the real paper that started the discussion? I looked through the references in the linked arxiv paper but could not find it.

This is discussed by Feynman as “physiological” work. See: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_14.html#Ch14-S1

Math is wide and deep. You won’t need to cover every topic in math to get going with physics. If you really are interested in physics there are many things in math, which are, well, less important (for doing basic physics). For example LCM, GCD and factoring. I guess, these things are somewhat important in Computer Science, but I never encountered them in a physics problem. So to get started with physics, I would suggest that you focus mainly on analysis (differentiation and integration) and vector algebra. As an addition maybe the basics of complex numbers. This can be learned relatively quickly.

With these you should be able to follow the Feynman lectures or watch the very fine „Theoretical Minimum“ series by Susskind (http://theoreticalminimum.com)

Thanks for the pointers. Much appreciated.

I'm doing a full review of mathematics at the moment. Not in depth, more of a "here's an application of the GCD function" so I know what tools to use to solve specific problems. All this is beneficial for the day job as well who expect to see some value from my time spent even though I'm not being totally honest with the objective to them. Realistically I want to think abstractly in the terms of mathematics and develop some intuition.

Was completely unaware of the Theoretical Minimum series. Thanks for that.

Edit: I'm reading Mathematics: From the birth of numbers by Jan Gullberg as a text. Wonderful book. Covers just about everything and is beautifully written by a non mathematician with no assumptions spared and no education target. In fact the forward is mainly bitching about the education system. Slightly worried I will get distracted by this book but that's never a loss!

I do not know "Mathematics: From the birth of numbers" but judging from the Amazon quick view it seems to cover a lot of ground (BTW: one thing I missed in my list are the basics of differential equations).

Over 1000 pages is quite a long read, though. I never managed to read a (science) book as big as that from cover to cover myself. One thing I learned through the years is to never use only one book for learning. Books have different styles and not every style fits to every student. Additionally one book might be good at one specific topic and weak on another. So nowadays I always use a couple of books (or online resources) to learn a new topic.

Its huge yes but a lot of it is fluff and history. It does serve to keep it interesting however.

Quick page shot to show the scope and density: http://i.imgur.com/sV1WYFd.jpg

I have a number of other books as well that I use as a reference as well so no problems there (calculus for the practical man has some different insights). Oh and betterexplained.com.

On a related note, Mary Boas's text, Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences does a great job of giving you the necessary bag of tricks to learn all of undergraduate level physics (and probably much more) without diving too deep into any single topic. It should be sufficient to give you lots of intuition until you decide to pursue something at much greater depth (although doing that alone, and without a professor/PI/expert of some sort is realistically, almost definitely a waste of effort).

You will certainly need them if you have any interest in quantum information.

If one has any interest in quantum field theory, I would add complex analysis (countour integrals in particular) to that list.

I just noticed in the article the passage from "The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn" ("Haven’t you ever noticed how much more interesting the unknown is than the known?") which is missing in the german translation from "edition wunschmaschine". I did a rough comparison based on the amazon preview of the english translation and found some other paragraphs missing in the german translation. This specific german translation was licensed from the former GDR publishing company "Verlag Volk & Welt".

Preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7790

The arxiv link seems to be http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4318