The Theoretical Minimum (2013)

They aren't exactly pretty but undergraduates are usually prescribed a "university physics" book or something with along the lines of that title.

You aren't missing anything by not doing calculus based physics, you have to "learn" it again from scratch.

Feynman Lectures are incredible and available for free!

I actually first learned about calculus from this chapter :)

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_08.html

The pop physics around relativity is particularly bad so I am happy that helped!

Relativity does not have to be super mathy, special relativity is kind of just a postulation that maybe there's a different sort of Doppler shift in the world. In the normal Doppler shift, clocks moving towards you appear to tick fast and clocks moving away from you appear to tick slow. Relativity adds a universal effect where if you accelerate towards a clock, it will also appear to tick faster, in proportion to both your acceleration and its coordinate along that acceleration line. So it's just an anomalous Doppler shift, to first order. (And all higher-order behavior can be derived from that.)

So like in the twin paradox, it is resolved because one of the twins accelerates towards the other twin, and when that acceleration is happening the other twin gets much much older very quickly because they are far away and the twin is accelerating towards them.

Furthermore this makes it much easier to understand some aspects of general relativity quite quickly. For example you get gravitational time dilation without much effort, once you postulate that the state of nature is freefall and we are actually accelerating against that, in a constant acceleration g upwards, which is why things in the natural state of freefall appear to accelerate downwards with acceleration g, you immediately predict that relativity will tell you that you see clocks in the upper atmosphere tick faster than they do down here. Furthermore you predict that if you could see through the Earth, at some surface below you you would hypothetically see clocks stand still, leading into a quick intuition for black holes.

I went trough Quantum Mechanics course and it really helped me understand Quantum Mechanics on mathematical level. I had my head full of Quantum woo from popular science programs and I barely could make heads or tails out of it. Knowing basic mathematics behind it helped a lot.

I am not a physicist but I have gone through most of the courses. It is aimed at preparing you to be able to read theorethical phisics research papers. It is not supposed to be practical and is ignoring engineering physics and history of phsics for the most part.

I think you can learn here the core concepts in theorethical phisics even at the masters program level, but you will not go through the same "math muscle training" that college students go through, so you will have to supplement that from elsewhere.

The answer to your question is Labs. In the Labs you reproduce the results many of the 19-20th century experiments.

Physics is really a working knowledge, like computer programming. You have to be able to solve problems. All the 'practical' and 'intuitive' aspects of theoretical physics are built by working on problem sheets. A lot of progress in understanding (both personally and for the field!) is in tackling apparent paradoxes.

Susskind's courses are very much overviews / appreciations. For each of these areas (GR, StatMech, Quantum etc.) you would expect several 30-hr lecturer courses + problem sheets (or equivalent working through a textbook) to gain a deep knowledge.

If you want to understand physics, then you need to build physical models and demonstrations, or perform experiments. If you want to get correct answers and make predictions, or you want to build a virtual model, then you need to study math a lot.

Susskind's excellent lectures are very much a survey of physics. They're great for a lay person trying to get an initial grip on the subject matter. These lectures necessarily can't have the mathematical content that you would see even in an undergrad program. The lectures I've seen introduce the key mathematical ideas but don't exercise them in a way someone learning to be a practitioner would.

> how much more do you get if you go through a true physics bachelor program?

Every physics major will spend countless long nights working problems with pages and pages of algebraic manipulation and mathematical reasoning. It is (and must be) much more mathematical than what you see in the Susskind lectures. They're not intended to be an alternative to a traditional program, but IMHO, they do give a true understanding of the main concepts in physics.

Looking at Susskind's youtube, he has massive amount of content on Special Relativity (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD9DDFBDC338226CA). Content-wise, it's the same as what a physics major would see, but without the many, many hours of problem solving exercises. The wonderful thing about Special Relativity is that it takes not a whole lot more than careful reasoning, a fair amount of algebra, and a little calculus to understand. The Susskind lectures actually go a bit farther, applying Special Relativity to Electro-Magnetism

One of the issues that Physics has (as a field) that others do not suffer, is a proliferation of cranks. I suspect that Susskind intends, in part, to counteract the cranks by providing solid, correct informational resources to the general public.