How To Study Physics
Few important points to understand while researching in Physics
Physics is the science that describes the physical reality of the universe. You have a pen and a paper, you sit down for hours doodling around with mathematical equations, and you can revolutionize our understanding of the universe. Theoretical physics, to me, is a fascinating discipline as it is the foundation of pretty much all physical sciences, and of course, is extremely fun to do. This story is not about how to score great marks in Physics if that’s your major. I think I have covered that in my previous articles. This is about how to do actual physics. The one thing that I always suggest to people is that one shouldn’t pursue physics if they aren’t serious about it. I have seen a lot of people who divert their career from physics and go on to choose other disciplines, primarily for making money. Don’t study physics for making a load of money, study it because you want to understand the universe around you, study for the joy of it, the kick that you get after discovering something that has never been discovered before, the thrill you get after you solve an ages-old physics problem. Here I shall share with you a few important things that you as a physics major or a physics enthusiast should keep in mind for effective learning.
1. Your mathematics has to be strong
Mathematics is the father of theoretical physics. Let’s admit it, if your math isn’t strong, it’s unlikely that you will get an actual grasp on the subject. Be it simple harmonic motion, or operator formalism in quantum mechanics, mathematics is used pretty much everywhere. Physics is not a literature-based subject, it’s a mathematical discipline. Your understanding of fundamental and advanced calculus, linear algebra, geometrical analysis, vector, and tensor analysis, topology, number theory, trigonometry, and differential equations must be strong in order to properly study and understand physics. Einstein never did a single experiment in his life, all his discoveries were the results of his thought experiments and complex mathematical equations.
2. Learn how to experiment and analyze experimental data
If you are good at theoretical mathematical works but if you do not know how to test your theory or for that matter analyze the experimental results that someone else has done for you, then it’s going to be difficult for you. Especially in undergrad physics classes, the students are made to conduct physics experiments and it is often seen that while reporting their results they tend to present the pre-established data and not their own. That isn’t the way how it’s done. You need to be able to experiment your works out and analyze the consistency of your theoretical predictions with the experimental findings. That’s how science works!
3. Scientific literature is important
This is something that I understood much later in my life. Even if you are an undergrad student majoring in physics, or a high school student with a keen interest in physics, you should know how to publish your results or your research. I think this is something that should be taught in every school. Keeping your work to yourself will not help you in any manner. When you do some work in physics that makes actual sense, you need to put it out there for the rest of the physics community to study. Someone else might have similar ideas as yours, or a different experimental approach than yours, that is ultimately going to filter your research to its purest and most admissible form. Learn how to write papers and publish them in journals. This helps you reach out to the rest of like-minded people who would want to collaborate with you in your research works. This brings me to another important point.
4. Collaboration might help a great deal
Being an independent researcher in physics is great if you can work things out yourself. Collaborating and involving people from similar fields of interest and similar fields of research with help you a great deal. No one is perfect, and one of the advantages of collaboration in scientific research is that you know your mistakes faster. When you are doing independent research in physics, or in any scientific discipline for that matter, chances are that you will make significant mistakes, and sometimes they are hard to point out. If you don’t point it out, your published work and hence your entire scientific research is flawed. Collaboration can help add great intellectual advantages to your ideas.
5. Study hard
There’s a profound statement by Richard Feynman that says,
“You cannot discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff.”
In order to do something really new and profound in physics, you need to study a lot. Study the scientific papers of related topics, associated books, journals, articles, and everything that you can get your hands on that might help in your understanding of the topic you want to study. I think that’s where the actual fun lies, more than the results of your research, the fun is in the process of finding things out.
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