Physics: A Field Guide

An interactive textbook about matter, motion, energy, light, and the people who figured out how to read them.

This is a full physics curriculum, structured as a field guide and technical textbook, designed to carry a student with no prior exposure through the same material covered in a research-level graduate physics education. It is not a summary or a survey. The chapters are meant to be read carefully, worked through, tested, and understood.

The curriculum is organized into seven tracks: Classical Mechanics, Waves & Oscillations, Thermodynamics, Electromagnetism, Optics, Modern Physics, and Mathematics for Physics. Each track spans five levels of depth — from a high school introduction through graduate coursework and frontier research topics. The full scope is laid out in the curriculum roadmap.

What makes physics different from other sciences is that it seeks the smallest possible number of fundamental principles from which everything else follows by logical necessity. Newton's three laws govern the motion of every object from a falling apple to a deep-space probe. Maxwell's four equations describe every electromagnetic phenomenon ever observed. The Schrödinger equation dictates the behavior of every atom. The ambition of this curriculum is not merely to transmit these results — it is to show you how physicists think: how to construct a model of a physical system, how to extract predictions from it mathematically, and how to confront those predictions against experiment.

Each chapter contains formal definitions, theorems, worked examples, and short field notes about how the ideas were discovered. Where a concept benefits from visualization, a live interactive simulation is embedded directly in the text. Practice exercises include numeric answer checking with progressive hints. An AI tutor, running locally, knows what chapter you are reading and can answer questions or work through problems with you.