Advice to High-School Students interesting in physics

Hello Alissa,

My name is John Alison and I am with the physics department at CMU. A colleague forwarded your mail about your son being interested in physics.

Here are a couple ideas:

• My #1 top recommendation is doing the PGSS https://www.cmu.edu/mcs/pgss/ This is for rising seniors to come to campus for a month and take classes, so you still have some time to prepare. It's a great program, exactly designed for students who want to go deeper in science.
• If he wants to take a "field trip" to campus I'm happy to discuss my research with him and show him my lab
  • My usual advice to students is to get a solid grounding in the core physics material: eg: classical physics and E&M. These are very well covered in any of the various intro university physics books. ChatGPT or Claude are probably even better. I would recommend him asking them for a self-study curriculum. These are nice b/c he can tailor it to the specifics of his background.

• There are also very good books aimed at a general audience/ aspiring physicist that you could read without having advanced classes. My favorites are:

  -) Steven Weinberg "Dreams of a Final theory" -) Richard Feynman "The character of physical law" -) Richard Feynman "QED: The strange theory of light and matter"

• Once you have a grasp of the basic material I would recommend having a look at "The Feynman lectures in physics"

These cover the same material in a more advanced way. They can be very valuable even if you don't understand everything in them (even I still don't!)

I would say the best thing to do is get a solid grounding in the core physics material: eg: classical physics and E&M. 

These are very well covered in any of the various intro university physics books. 

Once you have read that I would recommend having a look at     "The Feynman lectures in physics" These cover the same material in a much more advanced way. They can be very valuable even if you don't understand everything in them (even I still don't!)   There are also very good books aimed at a general audience that you could read without having advanced classes.  My favorites are:

  -) Steven Weinberg "Dreams of a Final theory"    -) Richard Feynman "The character of physical law"   -) Richard Feynman "QED: The strange theory of light and matter"

I would definitely have a look at those.

Advice