Thank you.
But to get a proper advice it's necessary to have more data ... What is your current level? Do you have a university degree? Secondary school? Age? Country? Where do you work?
I’m in SoCal, US. I’m 24/M. No degrees. I’m a software engineer by day.
I spend a lot of time thinking about these topics but with no real fundamentals or knowledge to be able to put words to the ideas I’m envisioning. School has never been my first choice method to learning something new, but I realize that that may be the best bet for this type of study.
Here in Argentina many universities have the recommended books and the class problem for each course in the web page, so you can "take" the course for free if you read all the theoretical material and do all the homework. It's not official but it's a good guideline for which books to read and in which order. Don't skip the elementary courses. I guess that in the US some universities have a similar free content.
The problem is to get feedback about the questions and the homework. I don't know if there is a newbie physics stackoverflow.
You can try to work with some research group. Sometimes they need a programmer. Some can pay you, some expect you to work for free, some don't want to explain anything to an stranger. Also, most groups don't work in fancy topics, most topics are more boring.
And don't expect a very modern software practices, many people use Fortran with a code style created before Fortran 77 and no version control (each paper is a folder with custom single use code).(Note: Modern Fortran is very fast, sometime faster then C.)
Anyway, if you want to work as a programmer for a physics group, I think that taking (formally or informally) some course will be good so you can talk to them and understand what they are saying and how they think.