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Comment by sytelus

This is really a bad idea to study anything. Actually this is what sets aside naïve hobbyist interested in Physics vs someone studying Physics systematically and efficiently as part of PhD program. I did this mistake repeatedly. I started with annotated version of Newton's Principia, spent about a year just pulling my hair and gave up to realize how much time I had lost in all kind of minutia, noise and random things that were completely useless to develop good understanding of core principles. I repeated this mistake yet again by buying Maxwell's original publications and wasting yet another year. And then again with Einstein's original papers and wasting yet another year.

I thought I would do differently and everyone else was doing wrong. I was the one doing wrong. I didn't learned much from all these original manuscript. I also lost precious years which I could have obtained real Masters degree. It is super important to understand that original manuscripts have tons of noise and baggage that only make sense in historical context. They also have unbacked goods which are super hard to digest, if you can digest at all. A ton of experts have already spent their lives distilling these original writings that fits with everything else, easy to digest and doesn't have all that noise. So, get a good textbook and follow that. Stop chasing original manuscripts.

parent sytelus 3 years ago

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