knzhou.github.

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Advice For Introductory Physics

In this file I answer some frequently asked questions about learning physics and entering physics
competitions. For general logistical questions, see the USAPhO FAQ on the official AAPT website.
For advice for how to continue after finishing introductory physics, see this file.

Preliminaries
What should I know before I start learning physics?
In the American system, people typically learn physics in two stages. First, they take a year-
long algebra-based introductory course, which covers all subjects (mechanics, electromagnetism,
thermodynamics, a hint of modern physics), typically given in 10th or 11th grade, and corresponding
to AP Physics 1 and 2. Those interested in learning more typically take a second, calculus-based
introductory course, covering mechanics and electromagnetism, corresponding to AP Physics C.
To succeed in an algebra-based physics course, you should have a good grasp of algebra and
trigonometry, have good “number sense”, and know how to read graphs. (In terms of formal courses,
you should be taking Algebra II or higher at the same time.) If you don’t have this stuff down cold
(e.g. if you take more than one second to recall the value of sin 30◦ ), then everything will be much
harder, because a two-step problem will feel like it’s twenty steps, as you scramble to remember
math you’ve half-forgotten. It’s like trying to learn the guitar while hopping on one leg.

What should I know before I start entering physics competitions?

In America, about 3.5 million students graduate high school per year, 150,000 take AP Physics 1
(algebra-based mechanics), and 50,000 and 20,000 take the calculus-based AP Physics C mechanics
and electromagnetism tests, respectively. About 5,000 students take the F = ma exam, from which
400 students qualify for the US Physics Olympiad, 20 qualify for the training camp, and there 5 are
selected to travel to the International Physics Olympiad.
For people coming from a math background, the most important thing to remember is that
physics competitions aren’t like math competitions. The reason is that the typical American 10th
grader has taken ten years of math in school and zero years of physics. If you’re a bright student
that likes math, math competitions are a fun way of extending the knowledge you’ve spend a decade
building – you already have the foundations set.
If you’ve done well on math competitions, it’s tempting to jump directly into physics competitions
with the same attitude. After all, physics is just made of equations, which are math, right? If
you haven’t taken a solid year-long introductory physics course already, this attitude will make
you crash and burn. It typically results in people memorizing big lists of equations, without being
able to answer the most basic conceptual questions, and making ridiculous mistakes like confusing
tension T for time T because they’re the same letter. Without introductory physics under your belt,
you’re in the same position as a 1st grader is in math, trying to do a math competition without
even knowing how to add.
Another important difference is the role of more advanced classes. Richard Rusczyk famously
wrote in The Calculus Trap about how the standard math curriculum (calculus, multivariable
calculus, linear algebra) often just teaches a few calculational skills, without emphasizing the
problem solving skills needed in math competitions.

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This is true, but physics is different. Math competitions focus on niche topics like Euclidean
geometry which rarely come up in higher mathematics, but can be scaled up to arbitrary difficulty;
thus, advanced classes don’t usually help. By contrast, physics competitions were invented to spark
interest in higher physics. Climbing from the F = ma exam to the IPhO will take you on a tour
through some of its greatest ideas, from the ones that Newton pioneered to those behind recent
Nobel prizes. A good theoretical physics graduate student should be able to solve IPhO problems,
and that’s a good thing – it means you’re learning something real, not tricks made for a competition.
So if you’ve learned advanced topics like relativity and quantum mechanics on your own, don’t
hesitate to jump into competitions; you’ll be rewarded for your deeper knowledge. And if you find
these subjects interesting and are debating whether they would be worth doing, just jump in! It’s
all good stuff, because it’s physics, and physics is fun.

Resources
How can I start learning physics by myself?
You’re in luck, because there are better resources for learning physics independently now than ever
before! I’ll list a few at the end of this answer. However, I want to start with some warnings. These
days, it’s easy to find good resources, but it’s even easier to find bad resources, which always vastly
outnumber the good, and you can end up wasting tons of time.
First, if you’re just starting out, I strongly advise against using any resource that isn’t designed
as a cohesive whole, by a small group of experts. For example, the popular websites Brilliant and
Expii have lots of neat problems. But at this point, their physics curricula aren’t developed in
a complete and logical manner. The problems have wildly different notation, conventions, and
difficulty, and units tend not to be self-contained, often requiring knowledge from later units.
This especially applies to learning from Wikipedia. It has a lot of useful information, but if
you ever get confused reading it, e.g. if two definitions don’t seem to be compatible, or if a step
in a derivation doesn’t seem right, you should never, ever try to resolve it by opening up twenty
Wikipedia tabs. The answer is simply not going to be there, and you’ll just magnify your confusion.
The same goes for trying to learn by talking to GPT.
YouTube videos have related problems. You can search for any topic in physics and find hundreds
of videos where a guy records himself explaining it off the top of his head. The problem is that
most of these people have only learned the basics the previous day, often by skimming Wikipedia.
Because they’re just talking off the top of their heads, their videos tend to be vague, inaccurate,
stuffed with filler, and way too long – YouTube pays them by the minute. Sometimes students
instinctively try to fix this by cranking the video speed up to 3x, which I think is almost always
a mistake. If you ever get the urge to do this, it probably means the video carries too little new
information to be worth watching, either because it’s too basic or just bad.
When I was a kid, I always followed the procedure for information gathering taught to me in
public school: Google the term, open the top ten links, and then open all the links in those pages.
The typical result was that I’d get lost all day on an issue that should have taken five minutes,
wondering in despair why somebody didn’t just organize the material consistently. Only later did I
realize that this is literally what books and courses are! In fact, in the cases where YouTube and
Wikipedia explanations are complete and reliable, they’ve usually been copied line by line from
a book. If the book is a source of illumination, these secondary resources are just the shadows it
casts in various directions. The internet is certainly the world’s greatest source of amusing pictures

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and videos, but it’s not great for anything deep. All the physics resources and discussion published
online, combined, contain less content than a few good bookshelves. Probably the best thing about
the internet is that you can use it to find PDFs of such books.
Of course, books and courses also vary widely in quality, and it’s important to avoid getting
stuck on a poor one. To understand why, you have to consider how good textbooks are created
in the first place. Usually, a teacher will start a course using an existing textbook. If they care
enough, they’ll consider a wide variety of approaches, then gradually synthesize a new one for their
lectures, based on their preferences; perhaps it will be more modern, more mathematically rigorous,
or more intuitive than the others. Then they’ll start typing up lecture notes, and once those get
refined enough, they can drop the textbook and have the students read the notes directly. Over
many years, students will find errors and confusing spots in the notes, which the teacher fixes up,
while accruing a large bank of classroom-tested, interesting questions from the annual problem sets
and exams. Finally, the teacher staples all the materials together, and a new textbook is born. All
of the books and courses I recommend in this document were made this way.
There are two active ingredients in the process. The first is the students, who act as dedicated
test-readers, pushing the teacher to improve their materials year after year. Books that aren’t student
tested tend to be plagued with issues, such as constant typos, trivial or nonsensical problems, huge
jumps in difficulty, and crucial omissions. The second is the teacher’s deep expertise. To write a
good book, the teacher must know far more than what is actually contained in the book. This lets
them identify the big picture, understand problem solving strategies, create new problems, and see
the limitations of the usual formulas. Without this kind of expertise, books can still be clear, but
they’ll be missing something. They’ll tend to have lots of unoriginal plug-and-chug problems, rigid
advice that only works on such problems (“never use rotating frames”, “always begin by writing
F = ma for every particle”), and generalizations that don’t actually hold in the real world.
Therefore, a reliable way to find good books and courses is to look for those that have been
refined over a long period of time, by one or two professors, teaching a dedicated course at a good
university. So now we can finally get to some course recommendations!

• If you would like to get started with algebra-based physics, a good first goal is to pass AP
Physics 1/2. (Don’t worry about the F = ma exam yet.) Two good resources are the videos by
Flipping Physics and Khan Academy, which have been thoroughly tested and refined by great
teachers. If you’d like more structure, find an AP Physics course either online or in person
nearby. If you’re confident enough to study on your own, see the books recommended below.

• To learn calculus, you can get started with MIT OCW’s 18.01 course. You can also go through
any one of the nearly identical standard calculus books on the market, such as Stewart’s, which
all cover everything you need and more.1

• Once you know basic calculus, such as derivatives and single integrals, you’re ready to start
calculus-based physics. My top recommendation is Yale’s Fundamentals of Physics courses.
1
Mathematicians often complain that these books aren’t rigorous enough, and prefer books like Spivak’s. But
these books are meant to train mathematicians, not physicists. Spivak is great for that purpose, but it only has
a single chapter on actually performing specific integrals, and it starts with proving basic propositions like 0 < 1
and 1 + 1 ̸= 0. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you can start reading Spivak without any prior calculus
background. (Another good starting point is the Art of Problem Solving calculus book, which has a good balance of
proof sketches and concrete problems.) However, you won’t need any experience with rigorous proofs to get started
in physics. After all, Newton didn’t care about rigor when he invented calculus. When the mathematical foundations
of calculus were finally set, physicists had already been using it to solve real problems for generations.

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MIT OCW also has introductory physics courses, titled 8.01 and 8.02, but they have some
drawbacks. Walter Lewin’s old lectures are full of cool demonstrations, but they’re short on theory;
they would work better as a supplement if you’re interested. Meanwhile, the current 8.01 course is
broken up into 5 minute tidbits, which frankly makes it feel like a high school course to me, and
the 8.02 course materials are incomplete. EdX used to have a lot of great free options, but they’re
mostly shut down now, as its new owners try to figure out how to make money from them, and I
don’t think the new ones are nearly as good.
The reason it’s so hard to find good video lectures for introductory physics is that in the past
decade, most top universities switched to teaching these courses with active learning, where lecture
is replaced with group problem solving, and students do background reading at home. Education
research has shown that this works better for the average student, who would zone out during
traditional lectures, and learn nothing. If you’re motivated enough to be self-studying, that probably
doesn’t apply to you, so you shouldn’t feel bad about using lectures. But it does show that lectures
aren’t necessary, so you can do everything by just following good books and thinking hard.

What are some good introductory books at each level?

There’s a robust ecosystem of physics textbooks, with many good options.

• For algebra-based physics, commonly used books are listed in AIP’s survey of physics teachers.
Some examples of decent books, in very roughly increasing order of difficulty, include:

– Hewitt, Conceptual Physics.

– Serway and Faughn, Holt Physics.
– Serway and Vuille, College Physics.2
– Cutnell, Johnson, Young, and Stadler, Physics.
– Knight, Jones, and Field, College Physics: A Strategic Approach.
– Giancoli, Physics: Principles with Applications.

Judging from reviews and survey data, Hewitt is a good option for a typical high school course,
while Giancoli is good for an honors high school course, such as for AP Physics 1 and 2. However,
these books are all pretty similar, so you shouldn’t worry if you happen to have a different one.
None of these books are enough for physics competitions, but they’ll set a good foundation. To
start at this level, you should at least be simultaneously enrolled in an Algebra II math course.
If you’re comfortable with calculus, you could also just skip directly to calculus-based physics.

• For basic calculus-based physics, there are many books, such as the ones by Giancoli, Knight,
Serway and Jewett, Tipler and Mosca, Young and Freedman, and Halliday, Resnick, and Walker.
They all cover the same material, with nearly identical tables of contents, and they’re all suitable
for AP Physics C. Most of them have titles like “University Physics” or “Physics for Scientists
and Engineers”. They’re polished and equally good, so just use whichever you can easily get.
2
If you’re confused about the title, note that there’s substantial overlap between high school and college courses.
Most people who take physics courses in college are taking algebra-based introductory physics, which ranges in
difficulty between that of a typical high school course, and AP Physics 1 and 2. Similarly, most people who take math
courses take “College Math”, which is about equivalent to Algebra II. These types of courses are typically taken just
to fulfill a graduation requirement, and don’t usually lead to further physics and math courses. Most people who end
up majoring in physics start in calculus-based introductory physics in college, which is discussed below.

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• For more advanced calculus-based physics, I strongly recommend Physics (5th edition) by Halli-
day, Resnick, and Krane. This book is used in college honors courses, and has significantly more
challenging problems, which were edited by a past director of the USAPhO. The explanations
are very clear, and I know many people who have succeeded using it.

Like most physical things in America, introductory physics textbooks were built in the heady
days of the 1950s. After Sputnik, concerned scientists and policymakers made a societal push for
STEM education. This gave rise to many great books, such as the original Halliday and Resnick,
and the Feynman lectures. Halliday and Resnick was the dominant calculus-based physics textbook
in the 1960s, and things haven’t changed much since then. Newer textbooks are direct descendants,
sometimes taking topics out, but rarely adding new topics in. For example, Halliday and Resnick
itself split into two versions, Physics and Fundamentals of Physics, by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker.
The latter is essentially just Physics, but with the most advanced parts of each chapter removed.
When shopping for these books, you might notice that they come in many editions, and that
the latest edition is much more expensive than the rest. For example, Serway and Jewett is on its
10th edition, while Young and Freedman is on its 15th . However, you shouldn’t worry if you can’t
afford the latest edition, or if you happen to already have an earlier edition. The core introductory
physics curriculum hasn’t changed for decades; the real purpose of the endless editions is to keep
money steadily flowing in for the publishers. To make a new edition, they randomly rearrange the
ordering of the problems and the numbers inside, add a few janky “online-only” problems3 , and
lobby university administrators to force their instructors to make their students buy it. In other
words, the main purpose of new editions is to prevent students from buying cheap used copies.4
Of course, most of the time, you should prefer the latest edition of a book. They tend to have
fewer mistakes, and sometimes better content; for example, in the case of Halliday, Resnick, and
Krane, the latest (5th ) edition has many very useful multiple choice questions, and some extra tricky
problems. But these benefits don’t apply for textbooks with over 10 editions, which just tend to get
bloated with plug-and-chug problems and weird pictures. This is all just to say that while physics
is certainly real, there are a lot of things about the physics education system that aren’t. You don’t
need to use all its hyper-monetized features, and if something seems fake to you, it probably is.
On that subject, some folks have tried to fix the system by writing free textbooks available
online. The most popular ones are on Openstax, which has released nearly 100 textbooks in the
past few years. Unfortunately, while their mission is a great one, these proto-books aren’t ready to
replace polished, published books. The most rigorous Openstax book, titled “University Physics”,
is pitched at a much lower level than the calculus-based books listed above. Each chapter has
about half as much content, and almost zero nontrivial problems. Derivations often lack consistent
3
This is what the back covers of these books mean when they say they use the latest educational innovations. In
reality, it just means you type the answers to plug-and-chug problems into their system, rather than writing
√ them
down
√ on paper. The difference is that the automated system will sometimes mark you wrong for typing 1/ 2 instead
of 2/2, or 5.0 instead of 5.00. The actual purpose of the system to ensure that even once you have the textbook,
you can be charged again for the homework. It’s like loot boxes and DLC, but for physics.
4
If even a used copy is too expensive, you can consider buying “international” editions of textbooks, which
are sometimes marketed by publishers as “global”, “Indian”, or “South Asian” versions. (For example, one of the
international version of Halliday, Resnick, and Walker’s Fundamentals of Physics is called Principles of Physics.)
These books are printed on thin paper with a flimsy softcover binding, and cost about 80% less. Usually they have
comparable content, but various things like the table of contents or the index are made worse on purpose, so that
people have a reason to buy the full-price version. I used to try saving money in college by buying Indian editions,
but when I got Griffiths’ electromagnetism textbook, the whole chapter on magnetism was missing. These textbooks
are absolutely good enough to learn from, but if you have a choice you should probably get the original version.

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notation or the cleanest possible approach, and problems are often formulated vaguely or incorrectly.
This isn’t surprising, since the book was quickly cobbled together by dozens of busy authors.
There are also many supplemental books made for test preparation, such as Schaum’s outlines,
and the Princeton Review, Barron’s, and 5 Steps to a 5 series. I generally don’t recommend them.
They tend to have much higher average review ratings than real textbooks, but that’s because
the reviews are left by students who want to cram to pass, not learn. They are designed to get
you through the simplest questions with the least possible mental effort, and as such, don’t really
explain how or why anything works. Not only does this suck all the joy out of learning, it’ll leave
you unable to answer any question deeper than a one-step plug-and-chug. They may be okay for a
very quick first exposure, but you’ll want to upgrade to something better quite soon.

How can I tell if I understand algebra-based introductory physics?

I’ll let you in on a secret: there are standard benchmark exams used in physics education research
which have been designed over years to measure exactly this, for the purpose of evaluating new
teaching methods. Examples include the Force Concept Inventory and the Conceptual Survey of
Electricity and Magnetism. (Of course, they only work for research if people haven’t seen them
beforehand, but I think there are few enough people reading this that it won’t matter.)
Find these exams here. If you understand basic mechanics and electromagnetism, you should
be able to get above 90% on the FCI within 30 minutes, and above 80% on the CSEM within 45
minutes. If you can’t do this, then your physics is worse than ChatGPT’s, and you should back up
and review the subject. The newly redesigned AP Physics 1 and 2 exams are also a good benchmark;
these cover mechanics and everything else, respectively. If you can’t comfortably score a 5 on AP
Physics 1, your mechanics isn’t in good shape.

Competition Preparation
How long will it take to qualify for USAPhO/qualify for camp/win an IPhO gold medal?
This varies depending on the person and their motivation, but here’s my timeline.

• 9th grade: I took a standard pre-calculus course in school and didn’t know or learn any physics.

• 9th grade summer: I don’t recall learning anything. I grinded a lot on RuneScape, with
occasional breaks to practice for math competitions. (This didn’t help for physics competitions
at all, besides making me a bit faster at algebra. As I mentioned on the first page, physics is
different from math; it requires its own set of skills.)

• 10th grade: I took standard calculus and algebra-based introductory physics courses in school,
with great teachers in both. I didn’t prep for competitions, but I asked a lot of questions in
class, thought carefully about the intuition behind the equations, and occasionally skimmed the
mediocre Holt Physics book given. I just barely qualified for the USAPhO, and scored almost
zero on it. I found that experience really motivating, since it showed me that physics was full
of cool problems, which took a lot more than just plugging numbers into a formula sheet.

• 10th grade spring/summer: I self-studied calculus-based physics by reading the absolutely

terrible Barron’s AP Physics C prep book and randomly googling whenever I got confused.
This took roughly 150 hours of work. Some of this was done while avoiding MOP homework.

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• 11th grade: I read the awesome Halliday, Resnick, and Krane textbook, thoroughly under-
standing about one chapter per week, and mixing in past F = ma exams in January and past
USAPhOs in the spring. I didn’t use any other textbooks, or attend any prep courses or camps,
and my school had no dedicated physics club. I just self-studied roughly 10 hours a week, for
about 250 hours in total. That year I qualified for camp, worked through ten past IPhOs as
recommended by the camp coaches, and got an IPhO gold medal.

The point is that you don’t need a decade of study or a ton of prep programs to succeed. And this
isn’t just my experience. When we ask students on our IPhO team to describe their journey, they
usually say something very similar. After finishing introductory physics, they prepare for physics
competitions for a year, or maybe two if they have lots of other things going on. Prep courses are
common now, but most just take only one such course, or read just one good book. Some don’t
even prepare at all; they build their skills by following their curiosity.

Do you have to have Math Olympiad background to do well in the Physics Olympiad?
No. Having done both, there’s very little overlap in the skills you need. The ideas that come up
in combinatorics and number theory problems are almost never useful in physics. As for geometry,
I haven’t ever seen an USAPhO or IPhO question that required you to know more than the most
basic properties of conic sections. Doing algebra problems might make you faster at simplifying
complicated expressions, but those are rare in physics competitions too. Indeed, most of the
members of the U.S. Physics Team have never even taken the USAMO, and the vast majority have
not spent any time preparing for it. To do well at physics, you study physics, not triangle centers.
There are two reasons people might think the Olympiads are related. First, as I mentioned above,
Americans only start learning physics in school ten years after starting math, so anybody who will
like physics competitions will probably have been exposed to math competitions first. Second, in
both cases a student succeeds by teaching themselves a well-defined body of knowledge by struggling
through hard problems under time pressure, so developing the grit to do that for math can make
it easier to do the same for physics. But math competitions are absolutely not a prerequisite: you
can jump into physics even if you’ve never done a math competition.

Is prep program X, book Y, or course Z enough for USAPhO?

Any decent calculus-based physics course, book, or prep program is “enough”, in the sense that
they’ll all cover everything you need. But it’s up to you to turn that coverage into understanding!

What makes a competition prep program effective?

The main thing that makes a prep program effective is the student. The fact is that if a student isn’t
engaged, then prep programs are useless at best. This is obvious if you just look at the numbers.
Suppose an unmotivated student is dragged to a 1.5 hour class every week for eight weeks, then
grudgingly spends an hour a week on the homework. That only adds up to 20 low-quality hours of
learning. If practice stops entirely once the class ends, the knowledge will be quickly forgotten. As
such, there are a lot of people dragged to prep programs year after year, who never get very far.
Compare this to what I listed above: 400 hours accumulated over a single year. Objectively,
that isn’t a lot of time; people could easily spend longer than that on a single high-school course if
it’s loaded with busywork. But these hours were focused ones, and they were spaced out regularly.
I didn’t need to cram, because I’d been immersed in physics the whole time.

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Unfortunately, parents often don’t seem to get the message. I sometimes see them spend more
energy dragging their kid through prep classes and books than their kids spend actually thinking
about physics. Sometimes they even solve the problems for their kids! Parental involvement is like
salt. A pinch can enhance a dish, but too much overwhelms the taste, and adding more makes it
inedible. If a kid is fundamentally uninterested in an extracurricular, they should simply be allowed
to do something else. There are plenty of things to do in this world besides physics.
Students often feel obligated to attend prep programs because of their effective advertising. For
example, the PhysicsWOOT program run by Art of Problem Solving regularly boasts how many
US Physics Team members are in their course, omitting the fact that this is mostly because the
team members from the previous year get automatically enrolled for free. And prep programs for
the F = ma exam often boast that they “teach to the test”, giving a shortcut to success. This is
a myth. The F = ma exam requires a broad understanding of mechanics. It’s certainly possible
to characterize the solutions to individual problems as “tricks”, but if you don’t have a foundation,
there will be an overwhelmingly large number of tricks to memorize, and they’ll be ten times as
hard to remember because you won’t know where they come from. Prep programs that rely on
teaching tricks don’t actually work, while those that take the time to build a solid foundation are
just the same as any decent course or book. There’s no proprietary secret to learning physics. You
just have to think.

I can’t solve problems involving pulleys. Is there a dedicated book about pulleys?
There’s no such thing. Beginners tend to classify physics problems by their superficial features,
so that they’ll often say, e.g. that they “can” do inclined plane problems but “can’t” do pulley
problems, and think the solution is to drill tons of near-identical pulley problems. But once you
understand physics more deeply, you’ll see that both of those classes of problems are governed by the
same basic principles, i.e. Newton’s laws, plus energy and momentum conservation. In general, if
you find a problem unusually challenging, you should drill down and figure out what you’re missing
about the underlying principles, then review it in any decent textbook. In particular, you don’t
actually need more than one textbook for introductory mechanics.

If I know X, can I read book Z or should I read book Y first?

It depends on the context, but the answer that always works is to just try it and see. If you have
a lot of trouble solving even basic exercises in a given book, then you should use an easier book.
If you feel you’re not learning anything new from even the toughest problems in a book, then you
should use a harder book.

Do I really have to learn X if I want to win competitions?

For almost any value of X, the answer is “probably not”, but if you ask this kind of question
constantly, you won’t do well anyway. Stop and find a different extracurricular, one where you’re
excited to do more rather than bargaining to do less.

Jeez, okay, but can I qualify for USAPhO without knowing calculus?
Every problem on the F = ma exam can technically be solved without calculus, but most students
who pass the exam know calculus-based physics. The reason is that it’s hard to derive even the
simplest physics equations without using calculus. And if you don’t know how the equations are

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derived, you might only see them as a disconnected pile of results instead of an interconnected
web of ideas. This penalizes you on the F = ma exam, where many questions require the test
taker to think very carefully about which equations apply and why. It’s certainly not impossible
to pass without calculus, but you’re going to have to put in the time to build a solid conceptual
understanding either way – and it might end up up taking longer if you try to do it without calculus.
In fact, this is the reason I’m somewhat against the entire idea of algebra-based physics courses.
Calculus was literally invented by Newton to make physics possible; without it, you can’t really
derive anything. Conceptual courses without derivations can be good if they focus on their strengths:
experimental demonstrations, real-world applications, hands-on projects, and inspiring exposition.
(The first few Feynman lectures perfectly fit this mold.) But the typical algebra-based physics course
just tries to hit all the topics a calculus-based course does, which results in students mindlessly
plugging numbers into a long sheet of formulas they don’t understand.
Anyway, if you’re the kind of student interested in physics competitions, you would almost
certainly enjoy learning calculus anyway, so you should go ahead and do so!

And what about those weird things I learned in middle school?

The standard American public school physics curriculum has a lot of things that don’t really make
sense. For example, you are told to remember that there are exactly 3 kinds of lever, 4 ways to
write the equation of a line, 5 states of matter, 6 kinds of simple machine, and 7 steps in the
official Scientific Method. Or that when you round numbers, you should round to the closest digit,
unless you’re rounding a 5, in which case you should round to an even digit, unless the number
was negative. In some schools, you must remember that the pound is really a unit of mass; the
unit of weight is called the pound-force. In other schools, you must remember that the pound is
really a unit of weight; the unit of mass is called the pound-mass. In some schools, you must do
multiplication and division from left to right, so that 1/2 × 3 = 3/2. In other schools, you must do
multiplication before division, so that 1/2 × 3 = 1/6. In yet others, division comes first.
When I was a kid, I thought this minutia was incredibly boring. It turned me off science, which
seemed to boil down to the drawing of arbitrary distinctions and the memorization of arbitrary
rules.5 Thankfully, none of this trivia matters for the Olympiad, or physics in general. It’s cargo
cult learning, which vaguely looks like science, but in reality just keeps you busy.
But if it’s really that bad, why are millions of kids subjected to it every year? And why do
hundreds of thousands of teachers repeat it endlessly, exactly as they themselves were taught? Well,
the underlying problem for the teacher is that solving real, interesting problems takes a fair amount of
dedication and background on the part of the student. Covering minutia is a convenient alternative,
because most students can be trained to do it, and an infinite number of quiz problems on it can
be easily generated and graded. That’s why, when the physics education researcher Edward Redish
5
And learning these questionable rules is the good part; most of the time you just work on cutesy crafts. If
you didn’t go to an average American public school, examples include drawing hand turkeys, decorating cupcakes,
sculpting mitochondria, and making collages. In a typical week, I would make a burger-shaped book report, a Lego
model of Lithium, and a mosaic of Manitoba. I’d also have to bug my Chinese-educated parents to buy construction
paper, not regular paper, leaving them wondering why I needed scissors, glue, posterboard, and 5 colors of paper just
to learn long division. Indeed, most non-Americans are surprised by our emphasis of crafts over actual information,
which ultimately stems from certain modern educational philosophies. These philosophies say that it’s a sin for a
teacher to simply tell students what’s true; they should construct it from themselves. In practice, what this meant is
that we’d receive about two sentences of information, then get assigned some random topic, like quokkas or quasars.
Then we would spend hours copy-pasting from Wikipedia, with the teacher occasionally swinging by to remind us to
“use critical thinking”, which was kind of hard when nobody knew what the hell was going on.

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once asked his students what the most important equation in mechanics was, the most common
response was d = at2 /2. These days, teachers can use programs to automatically generate hundreds
of uniform acceleration problems, even in cases where uniform acceleration obviously doesn’t apply.
In math-heavy subjects, such as physics, there often isn’t enough genuine minutia to fill a whole
course. So curriculum designers compensate by making up fake minutia that no professional actually
uses, such as the ten different mechanical advantage formulas, or the amazingly complex rules for
rounding. Often, the rules you’re supposed to memorize don’t even agree from school to school,
and the reason is that they truly don’t matter. No puzzle in physics has ever hinged on whether
the One True Order of Operations was PEMDAS or PEDMAS, even though people never seem to
tire of debating it on social media. If you’re like I was as a kid, you’ll want to ignore this noise
altogether, but unfortunately grades6 are still quite important at this stage in your life. My advice
is to grit your teeth, learn it just well enough to maintain decent grades, and immediately forget it.
Treat schoolwork as a day job and save your energy for deeper things.
Of course, some of the arbitrary-looking stuff you learn in school actually does turn out to be
important. For example, you’ll probably spend a lot of time manipulating matrices, in what seems
to just be a complicated way to rewrite basic algebra. Most school teachers can’t tell you why this
is worthwhile, but matrices turn out to be extremely important in more advanced physics. So how
can you tell what you need to know? In general, you can avoid this problem by sticking to good
books. They’ll contain exactly what actually matters.

How should I prepare for the F = ma exam?

The main ingredient for success is a solid understanding of mechanics, which you can pick up from
any calculus-based physics textbook. I particularly recommend the first 17 chapters of Halliday,
Resnick, and Krane (5th edition), since it has plenty of tricky multiple choice questions. Once
you’re done, you should also prepare for the quirks of the F = ma exam, but don’t get the priority
flipped: exam preparation should take a couple dozen hours at most, while learning the foundations
takes hundreds of hours. And the foundations come first.
Anyway, the F = ma exam throws tricky multiple choice questions at you under extreme time
pressure, and the best way to prepare for that is to train on similar problems under timed conditions.
There are over 20 past F = ma exams publicly available, which gradually increase in difficulty over
time. After completing past F = ma exams, you should immediately check against the answer
key, and understand how to solve any question you missed. (Earlier F = ma exams don’t come
with detailed solutions. For 2011 through 2019, you can use the solutions in the book by Kisacanin
and Zhang, which are distributed for free on the AAPT website. From 2018 onward, there are
also detailed official solutions.) Another excellent resource is Morin’s Problems and Solutions in
Introductory Mechanics, which contains a lot of multiple choice questions, with explanations, at
about the right level.
6
Grades can be a decent indicator of learning if you have good teachers. But if you have bad teachers, they just
indicate obedience: whether you were able to parrot back dubious information, quickly and reliably, with a smile.
And we all know that the most expensive private schools give out the most A’s. So given the well-known problems of
grades, one might think it would be better to measure students in a way that has been carefully developed, refined,
and standardized by a competent outside party, such as an exam of some sort... but in the United States, such exams
are drastically watered down and deeply out of fashion. That’s why competitions are so important. They are even
more controversial among educators than standardized tests, since many educators view any kind of competition as
immoral, but the truth is that the competitive aspect is irrelevant. The real point of competitions is that they’re one
of the few places left you can put your skills to work on nontrivial problems, to see if you truly understand something.
And they’re definitely the only place you can do that with no budget or outside help.

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If you run out of problems, you could also try past PhysicsBowl questions, the CAP prize exam,
the first round of the British Physics Olympiad, or the Hong Kong Physics Olympiad. There are
also old F = ma exams going back to 1997 available for purchase on the AAPT website. However,
all these competitions are significantly more straightforward, and some contain non-mechanics
questions. I think it’s best to just make the most of the past F = ma exams.
If you prefer the structure of classroom-style instruction and have some spare cash, you could
consider the courses by Art of Problem Solving, AwesomeMath, or Tang Academy. However, you
should keep in mind that none of these courses are a replacement for learning basic mechanics – you
must already have a solid mechanics background to get anything out of them.

I lost many points on the F = ma exam due to silly mistakes. How do I avoid them?
If you think you have this problem, it’s probably not because you have some issue with doing basic
algebra. After all, if you’re taking the F = ma exam at all, then you passed introductory algebra,
which means you can do algebra with fairly good accuracy. The higher rate of “mistakes” on the
physics exam is often the result of a lack of understanding, not random error. It’s like a chess
player saying they lost a match just because they momentarily thought their bishop could move
like a knight, or a basketball player missing a shot because they were confused whether they had
to throw it with their hands or kick it with their feet. These kinds of mistakes are unimaginable
to experienced players, even when distracted or tired, and arise from a lack of familiarity with the
rules of the game. Here are some concrete tips:

• Make sure you have a strong conceptual understanding of mechanics. Errors in manipulating
basic equations will often immediately lead to absurd results. For example, if you manipulate
F = ma into a = m/F you’ll conclude that an isolated object has infinite acceleration, which
makes no sense. More generally, you can often simplify a problem by taking limiting cases,
i.e. by considering when some of its parameters go to zero, infinity, or become equal to each
other. Check that your answers make sense in as many limiting cases as possible. If possible,
visualize your answer happening with objects in the real world, and see if it fits your intuition.

• Check the ingredients of a calculation. If you make a mistake in a calculation, and you check
it by just reading it again and running through all the steps in your head, in the same order,
you’ll probably skip right over the mistake. Instead, try to check in a way that separates the
problem’s essential parts. For example, I like to do a “starting point” check to see if every
ingredient going into the derivation is right. Then, for the derivation itself, I do a “no number”
check where I ignore all the numbers, and just make sure that the variables are showing up
correctly, i.e. that something that should be in a numerator doesn’t end up in a denominator.
Finally I do a “number only” check where I only track things like factors of 2. In each check I
have to pay attention to only a few things at once, which makes it easier to catch errors.

• Organize your work as linearly as possible, keeping work from a single problem together. If you
realize something you wrote is wrong, make sure you clearly mark that in some way.

• Understand the reason a problem can be tricky. If you think a problem can be solved in five
seconds by directly applying a single standard formula, then it’s worth thinking for a whole
minute about whether that formula actually applies.

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Any advice for the USAPhO exam?

As mentioned above, the best way to prepare for the USAPhO is to spend about a year thoroughly
learning calculus-based introductory physics, from a resource like Halliday, Resnick, and Krane,
while mixing in previous exam problems for practice. You can then dive deeper into specific subfields
using the resources listed in my second advice file, which generally shouldn’t be necessary, but will
make USAPhO problems in that subfield a lot easier to approach. Here are some further tips:

• It’s good to practice under realistic conditions. When doing a USAPhO problem, work on
it uninterrupted for at least the full time limit (i.e. at least 30 minutes for recent USAPhO
problems), and write a solution as you go, boxing a definite final answer. Problems are scarce,
so you should never waste one by turning to the official solution before giving it a good try.

• People often ask how the USAPhO is scored. Of course, full correct answers alone will get
full credit, but partial credit can also be generous, as you can see from a past rubric here. To
increase your chances of getting it, you should write your solution clearly. The logic should flow
linearly down the page, and your handwriting should be legible, especially for your final answers.
You don’t have to rederive standard results. You also don’t have to write full sentences, but
it’s good to add phrases to explain what you’re doing (such as “by conservation of energy...”).

• In high school, you might have been made to follow silly rules to avoid losing points. For
example, you might have always had to draw a free body diagram, even in cases where it wasn’t
necessary or didn’t help. Or you might have had to write equations in a particular format, such
as xf = xi + v0 (tf − ti ) + a(tf − ti )2 /2 in a case where d = at2 /2 would have sufficed. These
rules are crutches, enforced by teachers because they make grading easier, and help average
students reliably solve plug-and-chug problems. They don’t apply on the USAPhO.

• You should also reserve a few entire USAPhO exams to take in one sitting, to practice time
management during a full exam. I recommend reading all of the problems at the start of the
exam, and beginning with whichever looks most approachable. It’s important to avoid spending
too long on any one problem, as some can be much harder than others. If you get stuck, try
moving to a different question, or going back to check your work on an earlier question.

• The USAPhO always has at least one completely new idea every year (e.g. liquid-gas phase
transitions in 2015, op amps in 2016, entropy conservation in 2017, diodes in 2018, rotation
with a changing pivot in 2019, nonideal gases in 2020, convection in 2021, and bending moments
in 2022). You shouldn’t be discouraged if they look unfamiliar. These questions are designed
to test your ability to learn and use new concepts, as would happen on the IPhO, and they
always contain enough information to solve without special knowledge. Be ready to adapt!

• According to past statistics, the median student gets about 25% of the points, and almost
no students get above 75%. Therefore, in the modern USAPhO with its 6 equally weighted
questions, a very rough guide is that 1 full question gets you an honorable mention, 2 gets
a bronze medal, 3 gets a silver medal, and 4 gets a gold medal. (Of course, you can also
accumulate these points through partial credit.) You definitely don’t have to solve everything.

• Don’t give up if the first problem seems hard, or get complacent if the last problem seems easy.
Difficulty varies from year to year. Almost everybody comes in with a similar introductory
physics background, so if you feel a test is unusually hard or easy, then others will too. During

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the exam, you should spend absolutely zero time worrying about how others are doing, and
just concentrate on doing the best you can.

Sir, what are your tips to crack JEE?

Since India is the world’s largest English-speaking country, I get a lot of questions along these lines,
but I really can’t help, because Indian exams differ from American ones in many ways. First, for
historical reasons, India’s physics curriculum is a lot closer to that of the former Soviet Union. That
means there’s a lot more emphasis on elementary mechanics, optics, circuits, and nuclear physics.
Second, the JEE is very competitive: of the million students take it every year, many of whom
spend their high school years living in coaching institutes, only about 1% are admitted to the IITs.
For this reason, anyone who spends time discussing physics on the English-language internet will
constantly be told that the JEE is the hardest exam in the world. And for a long time I thought
this was the case, until I saw the test itself. There are only two minutes allotted for each multiple
choice question, which is far too little for any to require deep thought. Instead, the exam is made
difficult by centering those questions around a vast amount of minutia that must be memorized.
As one example, when it comes to magnetostatics, students are often asked for the magnetic
field of a polygonal wire, or the off-axis field of a solenoid. These aren’t particularly useful results,
but they’re clean, and a top US student might be able to derive them in twenty minutes. But if
you only have two minutes, you have to have them already committed to memory, so you can just
mindlessly plug the numbers in. Worse, sometimes students are expected to memorize incorrect
or meaningless formulas. For instance, they need to remember that the “magnetic poles” of a bar
magnet are located exactly 1/16 of the way from the end – even though magnetic poles don’t exist.
There are countless more examples, across all fields of physics. Students learn trivia about surface
tension that isn’t true. They are tested on the fine details of reading Vernier calipers, though the
vast majority will never use one. And the questions are often missing information or poorly posed,
putting thoughtful students at a disadvantage. The situation doesn’t even improve when you look
at the hardest questions on the JEE Advanced. Sometimes, they are famous, beautiful puzzles that
can’t be solved properly in two minutes; here the difficulty is fake, as the most common method of
“solution” must be seeing it before, and memorizing the answer. Other times, they are incorrectly
formulated, with no correct answers, because the exam writers themselves got confused.
As a result of this poor exam design, Indian students often tell me they plan to skip learning
any “theory” to save time for “problem solving”. When I first heard this, I was very confused. How
can you have one without the other? Any decent textbook should explain the theory and then
show example problems. But apparently, it’s common to study problem solving without theory, in
the sense that you just memorize a lot of formulas and procedures without asking why they work,
or if they even make sense. I understand that not everyone has the time or inclination to really
understand the subject. Blind memorization probably is the most efficient way for the average
student to scrape by. But when it becomes the default method, competitive exams degrade from a
useful tool to motivate and measure learning, into an enormous waste of time.
That’s what Indian Olympiad team members have told me. In the Olympiad system, students
are expected to remember almost nothing, but they need to understand how physics fits together.
That enables them to solve completely new problems after some deep thought. By contrast, the
JEE system rewards broad knowledge, shallow pattern recognition, and raw speed. I suspect the
dominance of this system is the reason that India, with its vast numbers of highly talented students,
performs worse at Olympiads than much smaller countries like Taiwan and Singapore.

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Other Questions
How can I meet other students?
Currently, this Discord server is the most active English-language community for Olympiad physics.
But don’t spend too much time on it – an hour of learning is worth ten hours of discussing plans.

How can I preview PDFs of textbooks and papers before purchasing them legitimately?
For books, try Anna’s Archive, or Library Genesis if it’s down. For papers, try SciHub.

What’s the best way to spend my time learning?

Here are some principles that almost everyone, from teachers to researchers to bloggers, agrees on.

• Don’t passively consume content. When you read about a new physical idea, turn it over in
your head. Ask yourself where you’ve seen the idea at work in the real world. Look at its logical
development – what assumptions do you need to get from one equation to another? Get a feel
for how each equation behaves as the variables vary. Take limiting cases of them, relating them
to ideas you already know, or try to go beyond, seeing where they might fail. Try to reconstruct
the idea, in a way that makes it intuitive. Do practice problems, or make your own. Many
students don’t do any of these things, but claim they “understand the concepts” because it
“all makes sense”. They are experiencing the “illusion of explanatory depth”, mistaking vague
familiarity for true understanding. If you’re actually thinking about the material, you should
occasionally get confused; learning comes from noticing and resolving such confusions.

• Avoid skipping around. Sometimes, students skip straight to the exercises, figuring that they
can “learn by doing.” Then, when they get stuck, they haphazardly skim the text for equations
which seem to contain the right letters. (This is also a common problem for study groups
working on problem sets.) This procedure tends to make one-minute exercises take an hour,
and doesn’t work for nontrivial exercises at all. When you’re starting out, it’s most efficient to
spend a comparable amount of time learning theory (which includes both reading and thinking)
and solving concrete problems afterward. And theory should be learned linearly, in the same
order as the book’s chapters, to avoid unnecessary confusion and backtracking.

• Take time to chew and digest the ideas – at least a few hours per textbook chapter. Everybody
has their favorite way of doing this. Old people often insist that the one true way to learn, as
intended by millions of years of evolution, is to write full English sentences in cursive with a
fountain pen in a leather-bound notebook. But I type my notes in bulleted lists and others use
web-like structures such as mind maps, or even no notes at all. I have a friend who just walks
in circles mumbling to himself, and it works for him. I take occasional notes in the margins
of my books, while others keep them pristine. As long as you’re actually thinking about what
you’re reading, none of these details matter. Use whichever you like best, and it’ll work as long
as it keeps you engaged with the ideas.

• On a related note, it doesn’t matter much whether you primarily learn theory from books or
lectures. The average book is probably clearer than the average lecture, since books often
emerge from refinements of lecture notes. But lectures can be more engaging, because the
instructor presents live, in the flesh, in a room full of other students paying attention. Books

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can drown students in too much detail, but lectures can keep students from thinking if they’re
too busy taking notes. Sometimes students zone out in lecture and don’t remember anything
at all, but students also do the same with books, mindlessly rereading while highlighting every
word. Similarly, compared to live lectures, recorded lectures have pros and cons: you can rewind,
pause, or speed them up, but in the absence of a definite time slot you might never get around
to watching them at all. The point is that, even though there’s little empirical evidence that
people have different “learning styles”, people do vary in what gets them to effectively focus.
There is no one best option, and all of them can work, so choose whichever you like most.

• The best way to remember something long-term is spaced repetition: apply the idea the
moment you learn it, then reencounter and reuse it regularly. Good physics books and courses
will automatically make you do this, as long as you work steadily and linearly through them,
solving a good number of problems. (There are many online advocates of spaced repetition
via flashcards. The idea is to break a book into thousands of tiny chunks, put each chunk on
a flashcard, and randomly show yourself the flashcards using programs like Anki or Memrise.
For example, one flashcard might ask you “acceleration of a block down an inclined plane”,
and the other side of the flashcard would say “g sin θ.” The issue is that this is only good for
subjects that are broad, shallow, and repetitive, like learning vocabulary words in a foreign
language, or preparing for medical school exams. In Olympiad physics there just isn’t that
much to memorize, and solving new problems requires actually thinking, instead of kneejerk
reacting by rewriting the solutions to trivial problems. On a similar note, you should avoid
silly mnemonics for basic equations. Mnemonics are useful in other fields because they can
give some artificial meaning to something totally random, and people are best at remembering
meaningful stories. But physics equations aren’t random: they actually make sense, and if you
understand why they make sense, you’ll easily remember them.)

• Do practice problems just above your current level. Trivial exercises alone won’t make you
ready for harder ones, and if you do too many you’ll probably get bored, zone out, and start
making dumb mistakes, making the practice totally useless. On the other hand, if you skip
to very hard problems, you might spend long stretches of time making zero progress, or trick
yourself into thinking you see the answer without understanding the subtleties at play. Aim for
a difficulty level where you can work out most, but not all, problems completely by yourself.
Your practice should feel effortful, deliberate, and possibly a little uncomfortable.

• On a related note, avoid fooling yourself by relying on solutions. A solution is useless if you
haven’t already given a problem a good try first. Many students end up in way over their heads,
exclusively reading solutions without being able to work out anything for themselves. This is
as effective as trying to learn an instrument or sport by only watching others play it. When the
inevitable happens, students often say they “froze up”, “blanked”, or “don’t test well”. But
the truth is that they didn’t forget anything – they never developed the skills in the first place.

• When you finish doing a practice problem, reflect on how it went, and if you weren’t able
to do it, figure out the crucial steps you were missing. This is especially important if you’re
self-studying, as there won’t be many other ways to get timely, objective feedback, which is
absolutely necessary for learning.

• Make sure your studying is healthy. Long cram sessions aren’t effective. Take regular breaks
instead of sitting motionless for hours. Sleep enough to feel rested, drink water, eat food, and

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generally obey common sense. Studying when your brain or body is tired is only useful for
mindless tasks like cramming things into short-term memory, the opposite of what you need.

How should I self-study from Halliday, Resnick, and Krane?

Halliday, Resnick, and Krane has a total of 52 chapters (though the last 6 are on advanced topics),
and each chapter comes with multiple choice questions, conceptual questions, exercises, and problems.
A good pace would be an average of one chapter per week, or three chapters per two weeks.
If you’re self-studying, it’s essential to continuously test your knowledge, to avoid gaps in under-
standing. While reading a chapter, you should spend at least as long thinking about its contents as
you do physically reading the words. Afterward, I recommend spending at least a moment thinking
about every conceptual question, as many of them help you connect the theory to the real world,
and some are surprisingly deep. I also recommend doing all of the multiple choice questions, since
they are excellent preparation for the F = ma exam.
On the other hand, it probably isn’t worthwhile to do all of the exercises, since many reduce
to plugging numbers into standard formulas. I recommend skimming to see if you know how to
do them, and perhaps doing a small sample to check. On the other hand, the problems are more
subtle, and form a very useful bridge from “plug and chug” problems to competition problems. I
recommend reading all of the problems carefully, and doing at least half of them, depending on
which strike your interest.
Answers to odd-numbered exercises and problems are at the end of the book, and a detailed
instructor’s solution manual to all exercises and problems can be found online. There are no answers
to the multiple choice questions, but you can find my answers for the first 17 chapters here.

What are some important traps to avoid?

If you’re at a “top” high school, the biggest trap is confusing your schooling with your education. A
mild case of this looks like signing up for every AP class your school offers, spending all your nights
and weekends grinding out busywork you don’t really care about, and then obsessively reading
rubrics to argue a grade of 97% up to 98%. A more advanced symptom is jockeying for positions
within your school’s many fake clubs – that is, clubs which do nothing besides elect a gigantic slate
of “leadership” positions, make a shiny website listing those leaders and the “social impact” they’ll
have, and then do absolutely nothing for the rest of the year. In the terminal stages of this disease,
you could end up paying a lawyer to found a fake nonprofit for you in junior year, just because
twenty of your classmates did. People act in this undignified way because they think it’ll get them
ahead in our broken system, but that’s really not how it works. Even admissions officers are smart
enough to see through this most of the time, and even if they couldn’t, it still wouldn’t be worth
doing, because it leaves no room for real education!7
These “good” high schools often produce another trap: obsessive comparison. Sometimes students
will convince themselves they can’t succeed in physics, because while they got a 99 on a quiz, some
other kid in the class got 100. Or they monitor the ages of everybody accomplishing things in their
7
By the way, you can also go wrong by going too far in the opposite direction. Smart students often intuitively see
how fake the scramble for “leadership” resume items is, and some respond by resolving to do everything alone. But
while the system is definitely broken, it was originally intended to encourage you to develop genuinely useful skills.
In particular, you can develop your communication skills by working with others on physics problems, or helping
them understand points in your physics class. The ability to talk with people of different backgrounds becomes more
important the further you get into physics research.

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school, despairing if anybody required one fewer month of living to do something they did. This
is all silly, because learning is about what you do, not what others do. For example, I mentioned
above that when I was in 10th grade, I found the USAPhO completely impossible. What I didn’t
mention is that the same year, one of my classmates made the US Physics Team. Over the next
year, we both studied hard separately, and both won IPhO gold medals. The point is that learning
is not an exclusive act, and somebody knowing something doesn’t stop you from knowing it too.
It’s also important to remember that you’re a person with flesh and blood, not just a brain on a
stick. Lots of people spend thousands of hours studying in high school, and nearly zero exercising.
That’s a mistake: being in shape gives you more energy, and makes everything in life much easier.
(Anecdotally, it even seems to make people better at experimental physics exams!) Don’t fall into the
trap of thinking that the world’s divided into fit “jocks” and smart “nerds”, because the happiest
and healthiest people can do both. Even if you can’t be bothered to get to a gym, you can make a
lot of progress with bodyweight exercises. For example, when you’re doing long problems you can
take breaks by busting out pullups, pushups, or pistol squats.
Another common trap is overweighting the qualitative or the quantitative side. People in the
first category often say things like, “I don’t need to do any calculations, because I really understand
the concepts!” People in the second category will say, “Who cares why that works – I got the right
answer this time, didn’t I?” Of course, both are misguided, because to solve nontrivial problems
you’ll need to be comfortable with both sides. Now, at the frontier, it’s definitely true that there
are leading researchers that lean one way or the other. But make no mistake: all of them knew both
sides of the fundamentals extremely well. You might see pop science portray Newton and Einstein
as daydreaming visionaries, but their breakthroughs were enabled by years of grinding out concrete
calculations with their immense technical skills, as you can see from their notebooks.8
Overplanning is another common trap. A lot of people get caught up on finding the optimal
books and the optimal practice problems, and never actually starting to do either. I often hear
from students who have made totally unrealistic multi-year schedules. They plan to read all of
HRK in a month, before even looking at the first chapter, and their primary concern is what they’ll
do once they finish every textbook in existence. This is a bizarre failure mode with a simple root
cause. Often, these students know so little physics that they don’t have any idea if they like physics
– they just have the vague feeling that they ought to have something science-related to put on their
college apps. Since they lack real interest in the subject, they are repelled from actually doing it,
and instead spend their time dreaming about winning competitions (or, in the case of the adult
student, of defending the credit for their Nobel prize). Overplanning is a form of fantasy.
Again, sports are a good analogy. Consider somebody who made their country’s youth soccer
team. They probably started by playing casual games with their friends, perhaps on their school’s
team, gradually building up their skills while having fun. As they got better, the stakes were
gradually raised, until they ended up going to tournaments and doing daily deliberate practice with
a coach. But it wouldn’t have made sense to go looking for that coach before their first-ever soccer
game! You don’t start with planning, you start by playing the game and seeing if you enjoy it.
In both sports and physics, long-term motivation comes from small, consistent wins, not distant
goals. The elite athlete gets through a 6 AM practice session by focusing hard on improving their
8
People also like to say that Einstein failed math in school, became a patent clerk, then randomly figured out
relativity in a stroke of intuitive inspiration. Every part of that inspirational story is totally wrong. Einstein taught
himself calculus at age 14, aced the entrance exams for a top university, and wrote his annus mirabilis papers while
finishing his PhD at a top graduate program. He only worked as a patent clerk for a short time between being a PhD
student and a lecturer. If you want to do fundamental physics research, the best route is almost always through the
normal academic system.

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fitness and technique. The great physics student leaves a study session excited by what they’ve
learned about the world. You can get a fake version of this feeling by making a big planning
spreadsheet or downloading another twenty textbooks, but unlike the real thing, this alone doesn’t
get you anywhere. If you want to learn physics, the most important thing is to just do physics.

But will Olympiad physics medals help for college?

If you mean American college admissions, keep in mind that they’re decided by admissions officers,
not professors. The average Ivy League admissions officer is a recent college graduate with an
English degree, who forgot the quadratic formula long ago. While online forums for “chancing”
anxious high school students obsessively rank the prestige of various competitions, the truth is that
most admissions officers can’t remember the difference between them. It’s easy to forget this if
you focus exclusively on math and physics, but students in general can specialize into hundreds of
activities, such as quizbowl, painting, dance, and countless sports and musical instruments, each
of which has dozens of similarly-named competitions that vary enormously in rigor. It’s too much
for anyone to keep track of. So if you put your F = ma exam score on your resume, they certainly
won’t know what counts as a high score, they probably won’t know the exam is nontrivial, and they
might not even realize that it’s about physics!9 The exceptions to this rule are the STEM-focused
top schools, MIT and Caltech, which have specialized training programs for their admissions officers.
So most US Physics Team members are admitted to MIT and choose to go there.10
At other universities, even prestigious ones, the admissions office can’t reliably distinguish among
the top 2% of physics students. You’re in this group if you pass AP Physics C, and at that point the
decision rests on the vibes a random officer gets from your last name, and your essay. By staring
at that single page, that person will try to infer your personality, your passions, and your pedigree –
largely by collapsing you into a stereotype. You shouldn’t spend years obsessing over impressing
such people. It’s not worth it, and furthermore, the things that will really impress them are out of
your control. These are folks who see math as nothing more than an instrument of pain, and think
solely in terms of tragic stories and grand narratives. They are interested in the circumstances of
your birth, the intimate details of your personal life, and whether you have a polished story of it all.
Buying such polish takes a lot of money. Recently released documents show that, besides race, the
best predictor of your Harvard “personality” rating is whether your parents have a top 1% income
9
This is what I’ve learned from talking to real admissions officers. But if you can’t believe it, just put yourself
in their shoes. Your application is sitting in a giant pile; the person before you in the pile is a trumpet player and
horseback rider from a famous private school, and the person after you is a debater and nonprofit founder from an
urban public school. When the officer gets to your application, they have 5 minutes to decide whether it’s worth
a second look from the full committee. Only about 0.1% of high school students take the F = ma exam, so they
probably don’t even remember the last time somebody mentioned it. And even if they did, how would they know
that the Physics Olympiad is much harder than the Physics Bowl, but much easier than the Physics Cup? It’s easy
to get obsessed with hierarchies in your own world, and forget that it’s a tiny, tiny piece of the wider world.
10
MIT is an outlier in many ways. It’s currently the only top US school that requires SAT/ACT scores and the
only one that doesn’t give legacy preference. Compared to every Ivy League school, it has the least wealthy incoming
students, but its outgoing students become the most wealthy a decade later. It’s also very transparent, with many
of its admissions officers posting their thoughts publicly. Unfortunately, this great material can make high school
students think the process at other top schools is a lot more fair than it actually is. The real process used at Harvard,
Yale and Princeton is explained in The Chosen. I don’t recommend reading it, though. It’ll just make you feel
depressed, and in any case it’s out of date – the situation has gotten worse since it was written. Today, the worst part
of the system is its air of moral judgment. Adults like to think the system is fair, so if you know your stuff but don’t
get in, they’ll simply assume it’s because you’re a bad person, in some subtle way only an admissions officer can detect.
Regardless of what the law technically allows, in practice we have a system where this extremely homogeneous group
decides, with just vibes and last names, whether you have a soul. The only dignified response is to ignore them.

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($650,000 per year). Your score on an exam with a $10 registration fee will never thrill them in the
same way. So if you only wanted to study physics for your college apps, this is your warning! It’s
not your One Weird Trick to getting in, and it takes quite a lot more mental effort than similarly
prestigious activities.
The real point of physics competitions is to motivate students to learn things, so the more
important question is whether competition experience helps for the classes in a physics major. The
answer is absolutely yes. You’ll be able to skip to at least sophomore physics classes. Many people
struggle with those classes because they will be encountering real problems for the first time, which
require more than a single step, but you’ll have already seen problems that need many steps, and
even some that require creative leaps. In a typical college physics course, you will solve a “problem
set” every week, for a total of a few dozen problems in a semester; you’ll have already done hundreds
of comparable ones using the same problem solving skills. Most importantly, since you won’t have
to worry about surviving the problem sets, you’ll have space to think deeply about the big ideas.
Such thought is one of the most pleasurable and rewarding parts of being a physicist.

Do I have enough talent to make it?

In response to this difficult question, many well-intentioned adults assert that talent does not exist,
or that anybody can do anything if they really try. These trite sentiments come from a good place,
but they’re rarely satisfying to their recipients because they’re clearly not true.11 Talent does exist.
It’s the reason that wealthy families can spend tens of thousands of dollars propping up or outright
falsifying their children’s SAT scores, to get outscored by less advantaged kids using only the $20
Blue Book. More dramatically, it’s the reason that Ramanujan went from being the son of an Indian
clerk, doing mathematics alone in near starvation, to the apex of mathematics in Cambridge.
The more nuanced story is this: in legitimate systems, success comes from ability, and ability
comes from focused, effective practice. Dedicated practice comes from interest, and interest is
mediated by a combination of talent and socioeconomic factors.
To illustrate this point, consider the extreme case of child prodigies. Prodigies exist in chess,
music, math, and programming, but not in law, medicine, history, or literature, because the former
allow rapid learning and feedback, starting from minimal background knowledge. Children naturally
learn quickly, and a child knows immediately whether they’ve won or lost at chess, and when they’ve
made a clever move. Talent determines how often these exciting wins happen, and if there are
enough, a child can take a liking to chess, and begin a phase of rapid improvement.
Of course, socioeconomic factors play a role. Chess prodigies need someone to introduce them to
the game in the first place. They need stable homes and supportive parents, so that they have space
to focus on learning. They benefit from chess-playing adults they can look up to, a community
to help them learn faster, and a system of competitions to help them set goals and measure their
progress. That’s of course why chess prodigies appear in the West, Go prodigies appear in Asia,
and neither appear in bad times.
What does this have to do with physics? When I was a kid, I had a naive view of physics based
on talent. I thought every “level” of physics required some minimum bar of talent, and that people
just kept climbing until they hit a wall, a level of abstraction they were simply unable to grasp.
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Frankly, they can even come off as insulting. Sometimes I see people on the internet confiding that they’ve always
been unable to do basic arithmetic or algebra, despite extensive effort. They always get a hundred replies along the
lines of “I never had trouble and I’m just average – have you considered actually trying?”, or worse, “I’m just like
you and I had trouble too, I couldn’t pay attention because it was all just too easy!” This kind of humble-bragging
never helps anybody.

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After all, that’s how adults talked about it. They’d say things like, “math stopped making sense for
me at trigonometry”, or “I couldn’t make it past differential equations.” So when things got hard,
such as when I started quantum field theory, I had a sinking feeling that I was “hitting the wall.”
But in reality, the cognitive load of learning stays relatively constant. With modern resources,
the difficulty of learning quantum mechanics is about the same as learning introductory physics,
provided you have equal mastery of the prerequisites. The reason people hit walls is largely not
because the material gets inherently harder, but because they finally fall through the massive holes in
their foundations. For example, algorithmically, differentiating functions is not more complex than
doing long division: the number of things to keep track of, and new rules to apply, is comparable.
But people get stuck at the former because it tends to expose all the misunderstandings they’ve
ever had about basic things, like simplifying fractions. That’s the problem; it can’t be the raw
complexity of manipulating the symbols, because all of us can follow a much larger set of rules for
manipulating a much larger set of symbols, whenever we assemble letters into words and sentences.
While I brought up child prodigies to illustrate a point, they shouldn’t worry you in physics,
even though they certainly exist. Sometimes people give up because they know people younger than
them who are “ahead”. This makes as little sense as worrying about all the people older than them
who know more. How are you ever going to catch up to the people who are already in graduate
school? The question doesn’t make sense, because success doesn’t come from “catching up” to
people. Success in physics requires accumulating a body of knowledge, which takes on the order of
one year for high school physics competitions, and ten for physics research. People who get to that
point earlier in life just get a few extra years to use it; they don’t stop you from doing the same.
Indeed, you shouldn’t ever worry if you, or others, are ahead or behind of the “usual” track,
which is an arbitrary designation that changes all the time. The all-time top voted post on Reddit’s
AskPhysics is a warning to avoid learning anything faster than your high school teaches. But how
do you know if your school is going at the “right” speed? For example, if you’re from the United
States, you probably took Algebra I (with problems like “solve 2x + 3 = 5”, and “plot y = mx + b”)
at or before the age of 13. Was this correct? In many European and Asian countries, this sort of
material is covered well before age 13, so you’re behind. But the California Math Framework says
that, for the sake of equity, all students should learn it for the first time together in 9th grade (age
14), so you’ve unfairly skipped ahead. That is, if you trust politicians to tell you how to learn math.
The truth is that there’s no one right age to learn algebra, or calculus, or quantum mechanics.
When educators argue about it, they’re thinking about how it will impact averages, such as the
achievement gap or the PISA ranking. They’re not worrying for a moment about how it affects
bright students, who contribute negligibly to statistics. If you’re such a student, the best response
is to secede. Ignore this debate, sit at the back of the class, and teach yourself whatever you want.
When people on the internet complain about “being behind” or others “skipping ahead”, they’re
just expressing their own insecurities. There are many paths and timelines to success. I’ve met
child prodigies, but also tons of great researchers who never did the Olympiad, or didn’t do any
physics in high school, or even didn’t do physics until the end of college! What you should learn
next is determined by your goals, interests, and prior knowledge, not your age.
So let’s say that when you first learned physics, things clicked for you. You saw the world in a
different way, it felt good, and you wanted to learn more. If this rings true, I can assure you that
if you keep going, it’ll keep paying off. You’ll continue to get “aha!” moments. You’ll continue to
piece together, with concentrated effort, new ways of looking at the world. Of course, the rate at
which you do this depends on talent. But if you’ve made physical insights before, you will make
them in the future, if your foundations are good. There is no wall; how far you go is up to you.

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