One of the beautiful things about living in our time is the depth of human understanding and the pace of discovery. If you are interested in the secrets of the universe, and I am, it is an exciting time to be alive.
I've experienced frustration on a number of recent occasions where a scientist or science enthusiast was talking about the implications of a discovery, such as the Higgs boson, or the recent measurement of gravitational waves, and I could only understand a small watered-down portion of what was really going on.
Here I am, living in a world where people unlock the secrets of the universe for me and report back, and I can't even appreciate the answer they've given me because I'm not fluent in the universe's language. So I'm beginning a journey into math and physics. Ultimately I want to have an enthusiast's comprehension of both quantum and cosmology, and I know that to really understand these things is to understand them with numbers. So math first.
I don't know what the exact path forward will be. I'm starting with my old Calculus text, and I'm going to try to go through a chapter a week. If that's too much, I'll slow down. When I'm done with that, I'll figure out what the next hop is.
This will probably take me 4 or 5 years. I'll be 40 this year. I figure by time I'm 45 I will at least have made myself aware enough to appreciate what we know, what the big questions are and why, and which frontiers are being pushed. (And then, when Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres says "You can't do that! something something Hamiltonian something something FTL signaling", I will have some idea why turning into a cat will break the universe.)
It would be nice to enjoy this journey with other minds, and my schedule doesn't really permit normal classes, so if anyone is interested in this kind of thing or knows of relevant online communities, that would be neat.
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