>>12900334The best way to self-study physics (and math) is to find a university that you think is just beyond your intellectual level and look up their curriculum for their physics course online, most universities make their curriculum known so that incoming students can know what material they'll be studying.
Go through the course textbooks in the order that you would go through them in the course. If you're lucky they may even have their own course notes and material online (like MIT). By go through I do not mean just skim-read, nor do I mean just highlight the pages like you're a 15-year-old schoolgirl, I mean do the problems, if not every problem, every other one, if not every other one 1 out of every 3, just make sure you're doing them, this is where many highly educated individuals fail; they aren't proactive in their learning and because they can get by just by attending lectures, skimming books and doing the bare minimum, they will. They will invest the minimum effort required to get their degree and get "acceptable" grades. If you're self-studying your goal presumably isn't to get a degree out of your self-study but to actually understand physics/math, so it's paramount that you actually solve the problems.
Also, try your best to contextualize what you've learned in textbooks by looking up published papers on that given topic, think about the strengths and weaknesses of that study (every study has some way you could improve upon it if hypothetically given an unlimited budget, personnel and time).
This advice applies whether you're a non-academic physicist trying to understand physics in your spare time or a physics PhD trying to deepen knowledge.
I know I am just some anon on /sci/ but this is advice I wish someone had given me before I started my degrees, I'm starting a PhD soon but during my undergraduate, I was a terribly inefficient student (at one point my GPA was about 3.0) when I started doing the above my understanding skyrocketed.
