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I still remember how dumbfounded I was as a physics undergrad the first time I worked through the derivation of the wave equation of light from Maxwell's Laws. There are so many beautiful, awe-inspiring and existentially important ideas in physics that I wish more people could appreciate. Happy to see someone (especially someone so accomplished as prof t'Hooft) attempting to make them accessible for anyone with sufficient motivation and an internet connection.

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For those curious but with less ambition (t'Hooft's syllabus is pretty wild for people who don't actually want to work in the field) I'd recommend Leonard Susskind's Theoretical Minimum series. It's a lecture series recorded at Stanford, available for free on Youtube. There's even one or two books by now I believe that cover classical and quantum mechanics. The video lectures go all the way to the standard model, general relativity, cosmology and even some string theory - all of it presented in a way that people with upper high-school or lower undergrad level math knowledge should be able to follow.

Three books (classical mechanics, quantum mech., and special relativity + classical field theory) and a 4th one on general relativity coming next year.

I remember the very moment in my first year of phys undergrad when it clicked for me that what I was learning in my ODE, lin-alg, and classical mechanics were all related. It was like this 'holy shit it all makes sense' moment.

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