Learning physics in 2026
I've recently acquired interest for Physics once again in my life, and I'd like to get back as a hobby thing at least. It's about 8 years since I took any class lately, which ultimately makes me a bare-bones beginner.
So, I wanted to ask: is there any good course or book you could recommend on it? I'd appreciate some suggestions, I am reading the "University Physic" by Young and Freedman, and I was wondering if there is any other additional source I could use.
Its been awhile since I took it too.
One thing that is a blend of math and physics is units. They are far more interesting than most people give them credit for and they give you some much intuition for physics.
Units are things like kilometers, hours, and kilometers per hour.
Their abbreviations are km, hr, and km/hr.
Say you want to travel 300 km and you want to arrive in 2 hours, so you are curious how fast you need to travel. You know that speed is measured in km/hr but you don't know the equation.... actually you do know the equation, its there in the units, to get speed you take your km and divide it by hours. So 300km/2hr = 150km/hr.
Thats a pretty simple example but things become less obvious when you use units like newtons(N) which is actually made up of kgm/s^2 or impulse which is Ns or kg*m/s.
I thought Instant physics by Rothman was a good semi-popular overview. It's a good birds-eye-view of undergraduate physics.
MIT has an incredible archive of open course ware. If there are specific topics you want to pursue in-depth, that is a great resource for lectures, practice problems, and demonstration videos.