This is a collection of bookmarks I’ve collected over the years of useful online physics notes; hopefully this will be of some use to others. My bias is as a computational physicist doing electronic structure theory for materials modelling, so all within the remit of condensed matter theory (no high energy physics, for instance, and nothing that would count as ‘theoretical’ research for the last forty years at least). Expect little outside pedestrian quantum mechanics and statistical physics, and the one fundamental force you can actually interact with.
Partially inspired by Gerard ’t Hooft’s far more complete summary http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~Gadda001/goodtheorist/index.html
Lecture Notes
Richard Feynman (Caltech) The Feynman lectures on physics are now available to read freely online. http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
Lev Landau (Moscow) The original theoretical minimum; Landau’s fantastic series translated into English are available freely on the Internet archive. https://archive.org/details/Mechanics_541 - start with mechanics and search around!
David Tong (Cambridge) has written a highly recommended series of undergraduate (UG) notes. http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html
Leonard Susskind (Stanford) has a set of Youtube lectures as part of the Stanford Continuing Studies series. I like his very clear lecture style. The 2013 Stat Mech (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_IkS0viawhr3HcKH607rXbVqy28W_gB7) and Advanced QM (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcC5RwLpGl6eyNvVfAixR18_nDmsX9rh-) courses I really enjoy.
The accesssible course also dovetails with the recently published books (written with Art Friedman). http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
Richard Fitzpatrick (UT Austin) offers lecture notes, including some at the graduate level. http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching.html
Dan Styer (Oberlin) maintains a good set of Quantum-Mechanics notes on the web including a primer of common misconceptions. http://www.oberlin.edu/physics/dstyer/TeachQM/
Matthew Foulkes (Imperial) has a pleasingly dense and direct postgrad
course on electrons in solids - from UG Physics to DFT in 6 sections
http://www.cmth.ph.ic.ac.uk/people/m.foulkes/pdf/esolids.pdf
John Kitchin (Carnegie Mellon) has a set of notes on periodic DFT calculations (with VASP) and a Python primer (with the Atomic Simulation Environment) in doing materials modelling calculations. http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/pycse/ http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/dft-book/
Stefan Grimme (Bonn) has a great intro-to-QuantumChemistry set of notes which bridges the gap between a QM course and the terms used in typical codes. http://www.thch.uni-bonn.de/tc/teaching/qc2/downloads/
Sherrill Group (Georgia Tech) have a set of notes and Youtube videos on quantum chemistry. http://vergil.chemistry.gatech.edu/notes/index.html
TDDFT School TDDFT school research talks; rewrite the URL with a bit of a guess for other years! http://www.tddft.org/TDDFT2014/school/ http://www.tddft.org/TDDFT2010/school/ http://www.tddft.org/TDDFT2008/lectures/
Journal Clubs
Papercore is an interesting idea - produce a ‘super abstract’ summary of a research paper. Quite a spin-glass focus for the papers in here, where I guess it is used as the internal journal club. http://papercore.org/summaries
Books
In truth, all the best stuff is in the books; quality and presentation of the above notes is relatively hit and miss, and more polished and complete at the undergraduate level.
Physics is quite an esoteric pursuit, so unless you have access to a university you are unlikely to be able to find much beyond the Landau/Livshitz ‘Course in Theoretical Physics’ and the Feynman lectures in your library. Most physics books are horrendously expensive.
However, the Dover Books reissues in physics are fantastic and cheap; like classic movies a few decades hindsight has allowed the editors to sort the wheat from the chaff. The Futura / Bauhaus design for the latest covers is extremely aesthetically pleasing. Beware that some of the books from the dawn of Quantum Theory are more there for historical interest than utility as a textbook.
http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-physics-mathematical-and-theoretical-physics.html
