Independent learning: math, physics, and cosmology

This is my first post, so be gentle with me :). (And to be honest, it's an experiment.)

I’m a retired computing technologist with a BS in physics. Some time after I retired, I decided to study physics and cosmology beyond what I learned in school. Of course this entailed learning (and relearning) a lot of math that is necessary for understanding the material I’m interested in. I thought it might be interesting to talk about the fascinating journey I’ve been on, and hopefully find people of like mind to share knowledge and experiences with.

In late 2022, I started reading the Feynman Lectures on Physics, and I’m now most of the way through the second (of three) volumes. Feynman is a wonderful writer and teacher, and he has a great way of teaching physics that doesn’t necessarily follow what I expected as a normal textbook progression. That works well for me, in part because I tend to get interested in topics that are peripheral (and sometimes completely unrelated!) to the current main topic.

Aside from my non-linear approach to studying, I’ve had to spend a good portion of my time learning math. For most of my life, math has been a necessary evil to me. But as I delved deeper into theoretical physics, I’ve begun to really appreciate it’s central role. And I’ve even begun to really enjoy it. I’ve also learned that mathematicians and physicists don’t always think about math in the same way, let alone agree on things like notation. In fact, even among themselves, mathematicians have a lot of disagreements— as do physicists. Even with all of the wonderful resources that are available today on the web, it can still be very difficult to understand some topics.

Fortunately, I’ve discovered that AI chatbots can be very helpful in sorting this mess out! Of course I’ve read about how these tools can hallucinate and overgeneralize (often to the point of making statements that are completely incorrect), so I am quite careful to verify (as best I can) what I get from them. But they have been incredibly valuable for answering very specific questions that are practicly impossible to get answered using the usual search engines. I’ve also found that different bots sometimes have very different ways of responding to prompts, so they can sometimes provide alternative ways of understanding things.