Susan Rigetti's free DIY physics curriculum returns, updated after 600K readers

Susan Rigetti (formerly Fowler) has published a second edition of her self-study physics guide, first written in 2015 and used by more than 600,000 people since. The guide lays out an ordered curriculum of textbooks and popular science reading that mirrors a university physics education: work through the undergraduate list and you’ll have the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree (and be ready for the Physics GRE); complete the graduate core and you’ll match a master’s degree. A PhD, she notes, can’t be replicated independently because it hinges on years of supervised research and a thesis.

The 2021 refresh is a light one, driven by years of reader email: updated textbook editions, additional undergraduate electives, and a new section of graduate electives. The reading list leans on non-speculative popular books to keep learners motivated — Weinberg, Feynman, Frank Close, Kip Thorne, Susskind — while steering clear of the sensationalist pop-science titles she argues misrepresent what real physics study involves.

Rigetti frames the project as proof of two things: that sharing what you know, even informally, can have outsized reach, and that a large, underserved population wants to learn rigorous physics purely out of curiosity — people she says academia and mainstream publishers routinely underestimate. The first edition remains available on her older site.