Gravitational Waves Detected

With today's announcement of the detection of gravitational waves and the discovery of the Higg's Boson a couple of years ago, there is no better time to study physics!

My book list and tomorrow's announcement

As I said in my first post, I have a number of physics text books which I aim to work through. Below is the order in which I will proceed through them

Introduction to Classical Mechanics, French and Ebison
Electricity and Magnetism, Duffin
Electromagnetism, Grant and Phillips
Equilibrium Thermodynamics, Adkins
Properties of Matter, Flowers and Mendoza
Solid State Physics, Blakemore
Physics of Vibrations and Waves, Pain
Particle Physics, Martin and Shaw
Statistical Physics, Mandl
Special Relativity, French
Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei and Particles, Eisberg & Resnick

Those should keep me quite for some months to come.

Tomorrow I am eagerly awaiting an announcement from the LIGO team, who are searching for Gravitation waves. Maybe they've observed them, maybe not. If they have, maybe Einstein's theory of relativity will be finally promoted from being just a theory.

What an exciting time to be a physicist

Maths and edX

Without a good level of maths, physics is impossible to study. So not only will I be studying all the things I've set out in my previous post, but I also will be brushing up on my maths.

To do this I will firstly stick to a level what in the UK would be described as A-Level. I've acquired a complete set of the text books I used to study maths at A-level, Rostock, Chandler & Rourke's Pure Mathematics 1 & 2, Applied Mathematics 1 & 2 and Further Maths.

I've also found a good astrophysics course to study on edX, an XSeries of 4 courses provided by the Australian National University. covering The Violent Universe, Cosmology, Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe and Exploring Exoplanets. I've completed the Cosmology course, and I'll post a review of it in a future post and once I've completed the other three courses I will post about them too.

A first post, setting out my plans

Welcome to my astrophysics blog.

I earned a degree in Physics back in 1997, but didn't get a good enough result to take my studies further. I have since been working in aerospace, with some time abroad travelling and teaching English as a second language.

In the time since then I feel I've forgotten much. So I plan to reacquire the knowledge and skills I once had, which will be required if I want to take my studies further. So this blog will serve to chart my progress in this endeavour and it will also become a part of my learning process. I will post on various subjects and topics which I study

My plan is to work through Prof. Leonard Susskind's "The Theoretical Minimum" lectures, and his first two accompanying books on classical and quantum mechanics. It is believed that further books are planned.

From my university days, I have large set of paper notes. I hope to be able to review these and perhaps transform them into some sort of electronic form and maybe publish them. I'm not sure how I will achieve, but I have a few ideas.

I also have a number of books which have been largely unlooked at in the last 20 or so years. These I intend to work through. I also have in mind more book which will need to be acquired. This element of my studies will take time, however, once I complete a book I will post a review of it to allow you to decide whether it worth working through, should you have similar desires to myself.

I alluded earlier that intend to take my studies further. I have a course in mind, but I will not go into any more detail of this yet. Perhaps after I have won a place and completed it, which will be a few years from now, I will post more on this.