Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

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I've done this, learning advanced orbital mechanics on my spare time. But I manage to put in 1-3 hours a week, about one week per month at most and it's been almost half a year since the last time I was able to put my mind into it.

It's not like I don't have the time, it's the fact that I'm way too tired after work to do any substantial amount of learning. I think I could manage something that's much easier, say learning some languages or learning how to knit. But learning math, physics, etc just requires more than I have to give after work.

That said, I managed to get a firm understanding of orbital mechanics up to a level where I could probably ace all the tests for freshman-level courses at an aerospace university and I did all of it on Saturday afternoons (but it took me 5 years to do so).

I have carved out 1 hour in my morning before work to do things that I consider important. It's not quite enough time. I'm going to try to improve it to 1.5 hours. But either way, it means the best of my brain goes to me. Sometimes I give it to my employer, but not always. Most likely, you don't need the best of your brainpower to do your day-to-day work.

This is a great technique. I have a 2.5 hour morning routine, I do before I head to the office.

You'll often hear about famous writers, hollywood-writers, etc. doing this type of technique of doing their best creative work before the chaos of the day sets in.

> I've done this, learning advanced orbital mechanics on my spare time.

Sooo...... you play KSP? ;)

Yes, I play KSP and Orbiter.

In my study project, I learned thoroughly how to solve different two body problems (initial value, boundary value, closest approach) and wrote a C library [0] that's got all the orbital mechanics code you need to write your own Kerbal Space Program clone (but I don't intend to do that). During the process, I read 3-4 books and an inch thick pile of research papers.

[0] https://github.com/rikusalminen/twobody

If you'd like to start looking at three-body problems, you might be interested in studying the Kozai-Lidov mechanism. It's a really fascinating subject, so much so that I did my dissertation on it! Here's a really good paper (one of my all time favorites) to get you started: https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5244

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