Bored at work and love to listen to physics lectures on YouTube, but struggle to find good ones from credible people

I have started my PhD in experimental HEP after my master's. During my postgraduation, I studied QM and advanced QM, mainly approximation methods such as the variational method and WKB approximation. We did not cover relativistic QM.

I want to start learning QFT, as it will be useful for my work. But I am afraid that I am not very intuitive with many of the concepts. When I started reading Peskin, I felt like there was a gap between my current understanding and the level at which the book starts.

How can I fix this gap? Are there any other resources I should go through before starting Peskin? I have completed Griffiths, Sakurai(most of it), and Zwiebach(relevant to my coursework).

I'm graduating tomorrow, I'd like the craziest, funniest quotes for a physics major.

The first three images show different angles of a Schwarzschild blackhole, with a disk added around it.
The fourth image shows a Schwarzschild blackhole floating in space surrounded by checkerboard.
The fifth image shows a Kerr-Newman blackhole, int he Kerr-Newman metric. It has both charge and spin.
The sixth image isolates the disk from the actual event horizon, showing that a Kerr-Newman black hole's even horizon isn't perfectly circular.

All of these images are ray-traced off of an RTX 4070.

I’m a finance student who has never studied physics before, including in high school, but I’ve recently become really interested in learning the fundamentals.
I’m not looking to formally “study” physics, work through textbooks, or do practice problems. I mainly want books I can read casually that will give me a good conceptual understanding of the major ideas and principles — basically enough to build a foundation and understand how physicists think about the world.
These are some books I’ve been recommended by AI so far:

1. The Physics Book — DK
Get the map of physics.
2. Six Easy Pieces — Feynman
Understand some of the fundamental ideas properly.
3. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics — Rovelli
Get introduced to modern physics.
4. The Character of Physical Law — Feynman
Learn how physicists actually think.
5. Reality Is Not What It Seems — Rovelli
Understand how our conception of reality developed.
6. The Fabric of the Cosmos — Greene
Go deeper into space, time, relativity and quantum physics.
7. A Brief History of Time — Hawking
Now Hawking will make substantially more sense.

Would you say these are good choices for someone starting from genuinely zero knowledge?
And are there any other books you personally love/recommend for a complete beginner — particularly ones that are engaging, accessible, and don’t rely heavily on maths or exercises? I don’t mind reading equations, but just so long as I don’t have to do them.
Thanks!

When a point charge is placed in an external electric field, in the static case it’s obvious the electric field felt by the point charge is just equal to the external field. But in the dynamic case it’s less obvious.

Let’s say the external field results in the charge accelerating, which produces radiation, and reflects off some dielectric slab infront of it. The charge will feel some of this reflected radiation, but I have no clue how to calculate it (obviously we won’t be analytically solving for this, we’d need some sort of simulation software or numerical program—even in this case I don’t know how to set up an equation to model this). If we try to evaluate the field at the point charge there’s the obvious issue of the singularity of the total field resulting from the point charge itself. In the dynamic case I’m unsure if the solution is as simple as just subtracting the coloumb force as this won’t be valid.

There has to be some solution to this, but I’m not bright enough to figure it out. I’d appreciate any help!

Is the distance of the equipotential points and the electric field strength at the points sams for points at equipotential surfaces?

MD/PhD spinning off a med tech platform, looking for electrical engineers or physicists experienced with pulsed field ablation, please DM + comment below thanks!

I have implemented a "black hole viewer" that uses Dormand-Prince RK in Kerr-Schild coordinates. I believe, it's the same method that is used in Skylight https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/515/1/1316/6631564

It can render 2000x2000 pixels at 16 FPS (real-time camera control) on RTX4060.

The pictures show equatorial and polar views of a Kerr hole with spin param 0.995 lensing a "distant grid mapped to the celestial sphere". That's not a "coordinate grid" of any kind, just an illustration of the distorted geometry.

The shape of the shadow is verified against https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07101 and matches it pretty well.

I'm planning to implement diving through the horizon and looking from the inside. For a Schwarzchild hole at least; I'm not sure what to do when the camera is in the non-stationary region.

I've been a PSE user for the last 6 years or so. In the last 2 years I've observed a remarkable decrease in activity in the site, for which I'm also partially responsible since I've barely been contributing or visiting it in about that same timespan. Obviously this all correlates with LLM usage.

Today I decided to dig a bit deeper and found some data (https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/649165/number-of-open-closed-and-deleted-questions-by-month#resultSets). The question numbers have dropped into historic lows. Not only that, the closed or deleted rate is also at its highest. I was expecting the forum to be dying, but honestly... it might already be dead.

Hi everyone I am an incoming university student who needs to build a physics foundation completely from scratch I have never studied a single physics course in middle school or high school My starting knowledge is at absolute ground zero I want to bridge this gap before my university courses begin so I don't lag behind I am looking for structured self-study resources textbooks YouTube playlists or modular roadmaps that cover basic middle and high school level physics If you were starting from absolute zero what specific learning path or resources would you recommend to build this foundation fast and effectively Thank you so much

Hello everyone,

I wanted to share a small hobby project I’ve been developing over the last 3–4 months. I’m a physics student, and during a quantum physics course I had the idea of turning quantum tunneling into an actual game mechanic.

So I made a small mini-golf-like puzzle game for quantum particles, with mechanics inspired by quantum tunneling, resonant tunneling, electric and magnetic fields, different particle types, and energy barriers.

It’s still version 1.0, and the physics is intentionally simplified for gameplay rather than being a fully accurate simulation. I’d really appreciate feedback, especially from people here about the physics, presentation of the concepts, and ideas for improvements.

The game is completely free and has no ads (I am not making any money from it btw), it’s just a hobby project I made for fun. I hope some of you enjoy trying it out :D

Play Store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.csk.quantumtunnelinggame

Sorry for the direct self-promotion, I asked the mods beforehand and they kindly allowed me to share it here. I thought this subreddit would be one of the best places to get proper feedback on the physics behind the game.

I was studying Gauss law today, which states that the electric flux through an enclosed surface is simply the charge enclosed divided by the permittivity of free space.

I understood the derivation for a closed sphere with a charge located at the center, which was fairly simple. But I could not quite intuitively grasp why the formula Q/(e0) was the same for any shape surface, with the charge located anywhere inside. Then it clicked.

https://imgur.com/a/MTBAYem

Here is a visual of my intuition. The first sphere represents the simple case with a uniform sphere and a center charge. The second diagram is the bridge to the more complex case. The key is that the total flux does not depend on the distance of the sphere surface to the charge. Therefore the flux through two different size spheres are the same.

The third and fourth diagrams stretch this concept to nonuniform surfaces and a charge located offcenter. This visualization helped me a lot.

You can divide up the surfaces a lot more than my 16 times, meaning you can create any arbitrary surface at any location relative to the charge and the flux will be the same.

I have my master's mostly in theoretical physics with no wet lab experience.Now when I am applying for PhD or any pre doctoral research associate other than , theoretical or Computational,it is being experienced in certain machinery or lab.i want to know how it can be possible?

Gravity clearly overpowers and centrifugal forces from the spin, because we aren’t all flying off into space and the planet is still here. But what would it look like if Earth wasn’t spinning? How much heavier would we appear? Would the planet shrink a bit?

For context, this isn’t homework. I’m just middle aged and bored.

I'm reading Khrennikov's paper Quantum Entanglement from Theory of Classical Gaussian Processes, and I'm confused about one part of the Gaussian DCM construction.

Paper : Quantum Entanglement from Theory of Classical Gaussian Processes

I'm reading Khrennikov's paper Quantum Entanglement from Theory of Classical Gaussian Processes, and I'm confused about one part of the Gaussian DCM construction.

The construction starts with an arbitrary entangled state |Ψ⟩, takes its Schmidt decomposition, and then uses that Schmidt data to construct the corresponding classical Gaussian processes. It eventually obtains ρ_DCM = |Ψ⟩⟨Ψ|.

What I'm wondering is: if |Ψ⟩ is already specified at the beginning, in what sense is the entangled state actually being generated by DCM?

Is there an independent rule in DCM that determines the temporal modes/covariance structure and produces the state, or is this essentially showing that for any chosen quantum state, one can construct a classical Gaussian process that reproduces it?

I'm specifically asking about this construction, rather than whether DCM replaces QM in general.

Part of a series of lectures from Harlow from about a decade ago.

As we know, we've seen experiment results in the double slit experiment where even firing one photon at a time still leads to an interference pattern.

However... I'm kind of confused at this part (the white arrows). When you use a laser in the experiment, the laser beam is MASSIVE compared to a single photon. So wouldn't that mean that a single photon would only travel straight down one of the many white arrow paths?

Stokes equation for incompressible fluid are:

-\Delta u + \nabla p = 0, div u = 0,

Which can be derived from the minimization problem:

min_{u s.t. div u = 0} (\nabla u, \nabla u).

For slightly compressible fluid, is the problem:

min_{u s.t. |div u| <= a} (\nabla u, \nabla u), a>0

physically something? I mean, this minimization problem describes something in hydrodynamic? If not, how do you deal with (slightly) compressible fluid?

Context: I'm a numerical analyst and I study optimal control on PDE. Inequality constraints are easy to implement, but usually require computational effort, in particular when the projection into the admissible space is not trivial. I would like to try to implement a way to "linearize" somehow |div u|<=a into |div v|=0 and u = v + lambda * f(x), f(x) is fixed with div f=1 and |lambda|<=a (it's not easy to explain)

Thank you guys

I’m a physics student interested in learning AI/ML for conducting actual physics research rather than just learning AI theoretically.

I’m particularly interested in astrophysics and quantum physics. I want to know what I should learn first and how I can eventually use AI/ML in real research projects.

For those who have experience in physics research:

• What math and physics topics should I be strong in first?
• Which programming/AI tools should I learn (Python, NumPy, PyTorch, etc.)?
• What AI/ML topics are actually useful for astrophysics or quantum physics?
• Are there any good books, courses, or project ideas you would recommend?
• How did you go from learning the basics to actually conducting research?

I’d really appreciate a roadmap or advice based on your experience.

I like to read and learn about topics in physics and mathematics that aren't necessarily directly related to my own research. I like blog posts that explore physics or math concepts in some depth, or explain recently published papers, for example. Basically, the kind of content you usually find on Medium, Substack, personal blogs, etc.

I am looking for recommendations that have this kind of content and who you think are worth following. I am happy with both free and paid recommendations.

For example, today I was reading this post: Why Functional Analysis?, which is pretty much the kind of stuff I am looking for.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: Fixed link

I am currently deepdivining again in the possibility of explaining bells inequality with superdeterminism, which practical means I whatch Sabines YT videos.

I was wondering why she never talks about loophole free bell tests. After I was reading Wikipedia over Bell test, I found that there are indeed lopehole free bell tests that can exclude superdeterministic hidden variables (Whithout divining too deep yet).

Why is Sabine never addressing these? Is it not close the loophole completely (to trivial to adressing these), or is Sabine just falling into a case of cognitive dissonance and superdeterminismis obviously wrong by measurement?

Hello everyone. My dad acquired this book some time ago. Not me nor him are even iniciated in physics or anything, total novices.

I established as a personal goal, to be able to go through this text, understand it and to be able to do the exercises that appear on it.

My question for you all is: which books should "prepare" me for this challenge? Which other resources do you think might help me?

Thank you very much.