There's a guide on the internet for how to become a good theoretical physicist without going to university. It's written by a rather famous physicist which, to me, says it's a pretty valid source. The author is
Gerard 't Hooft, who won the 1999 Nobel prize in physics for his work as a theoretical physicist. It outlines some of the main subjects that will lead you to being a good theoretical physicist, along with some resources. Unfortunately a fair few of the links are (were) dead, but it really doesn't affect the good content.
An Agenda
The good content is primarily the "course agenda":
- Primary Mathematics
- Classical Mechanics
- Optics
- Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics
- Electronics
- Electromagnetism
- Computational Physics
- Quantum Mechanics
- Atoms and Molecules
- Solid State Physics
- Nuclear Physics
- Plasma physics
- Advanced Mathematics
- Special Relativity
- Advanced Quantum Mechanics
- Phenomenology
- General Relativity
- Quantum Field Theory
- Superstring Theory
That Bit at the End...
This is essentially a physics tour de force, but fortunately, this is ideal. To not take advice from a physics Nobel prize winner, surely must be a really bad idea. But it was the 1965 winner, Richard Feynman, who said that the Nobel prize was the scientists' equivalent of epaulets and uniform.
An UPDATE
Today, a year and a half after this was posted, I checked back on this website only to find it had been updated! So sometime between 2012 and 2014, t'Hooft has made the website really nice. In fact... I'm a little bit jealous... By the way, the link to the site is under the image :D.
