How many hours, in general/on average, does it take?

[damian.norton]

Hello. I am in desperate need for advice. I have searched for advice everywhere and each time failed to obtain it. This is my last resort. Please help me and bare with me while I explain the problem.

I am 28 years old guy. I have literally whole day free to pursue whatever goals I see fit, because I own several websites which are managed by my friend. I made a list of goals and physics/math is on the list. I will hire a teacher who will teach me math and physics every single day. Since I have other goals as well, I can only invest 1 hour per day on math, and 1 hour per day on physics. So, in total, thats 2 hours per day. I can keep up with this regime for 7 years. So, after 7 years, I will invested 2500 hours in physics and 2500 hours in math. I do not want to earn money with this because I already have stable, guaranteed income pretty much for the rest of my life, nor do I want official title/certificate/diploma/recognition. I am doing this purely for myself. Since I have other goals as well, I simply do not have enough time to attend a university. Assuming that everything else is average- average teacher, average focusing ability etc.- how much can I learn in this time? I have basic high school level knowledge in chemistry, physics and math. As an example- simply as a tool to express what level of knowledge I hope to achieve- I hope to have same level of knowledge as average bachelor degree holder (or higher) in math, and same level of knowledge as average bachelor degree holder (or higher) in physics. I want to specialize in Astrophysics and, if possible, Quantum physics (Theoretical physics?). As for math, I want to learn "pure mathematics" (if that's even a thing)

Provided that I will invest 2500 hours in physics and same amount of time in math, can I reach the level I am hoping for? If not, if 2500 hours in each field is not enough, then, generally speaking/on average, what amount of time would be enough? How much hours do uni students invest?

So, if I invest 2500 hours in physics and 2500 hours in math, can I hope to posses university-level knowledge in theoretical physics (Astrophysics/Quantum) and "pure mathematics"?

Forgive me my ignorance.This is it. Please help me. This is very important for me. Again, thanks all of you.

[Greg H.]

Just by running the numbers - an undergraduate degree at an american university is somewhere between 120 - 140 semester hours (depending on the university). 1 semester hour is considered to be (in general) 1 hour per week for 16 weeks - so 16 hours is equivalent to semester hour, which means that your average undergraduate degree is worth about 2080 total hours

 

With 5000 hours, you would have completed the equivalent raw hours of around 2 and 1/2 complete undergraduate degrees (which would also include other classes besides just science and math) so it should be reasonable to assume that you should have obtained a university level education in those two subjects by investing that amount of time.

 

However - this assume that the material you are studying is actually of an appropriate level.

[damian.norton]

Just by running the numbers - an undergraduate degree at an american university is somewhere between 120 - 140 semester hours (depending on the university). 1 semester hour is considered to be (in general) 1 hour per week for 16 weeks - so 16 hours is equivalent to semester hour, which means that your average undergraduate degree is worth about 2080 total hours

 

With 5000 hours, you would have completed the equivalent raw hours of around 2 and 1/2 complete undergraduate degrees (which would also include other classes besides just science and math) so it should be reasonable to assume that you should have obtained a university level education in those two subjects by investing that amount of time.

 

However - this assume that the material you are studying is actually of an appropriate level.

Thank you Greg H. Once I have invested 2 thousand hours equivalent of 1 undergraduate degree (bachelor degree), how much additional hours (semester hours) for next degrees? Thank you in advance.

[Strange]

You might want to read Gerard 't Hooft's comments on this: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index.html

[Sensei]

Time spend in university at lessons is one thing, and time spend on real learning at home/apartment/campus in another thing..

[studiot]

 

 

GregH

Just by running the numbers - an undergraduate degree at an american university is somewhere between 120 - 140 semester hours (depending on the university). 1 semester hour is considered to be (in general) 1 hour per week for 16 weeks - so 16 hours is equivalent to semester hour, which means that your average undergraduate degree is worth about 2080 total hours

 

With 5000 hours, you would have completed the equivalent raw hours of around 2 and 1/2 complete undergraduate degrees (which would also include other classes besides just science and math) so it should be reasonable to assume that you should have obtained a university level education in those two subjects by investing that amount of time.

 

Noting also the the OP is offering 1 hour per day (per subject for 7 years) that would imply an undergraduate spends only 2 hours per day on her Batchelor's degree!

 

More realistic figures I have heard are 10,000 hours study for most subjects at tertiary level, whether they are academic (eg maths) or practical (eg mechanical apprentiship).

[Greg H.]

 

Noting also the the OP is offering 1 hour per day (per subject for 7 years) that would imply an undergraduate spends only 2 hours per day on her Batchelor's degree!

 

More realistic figures I have heard are 10,000 hours study for most subjects at tertiary level, whether they are academic (eg maths) or practical (eg mechanical apprentiship).

This is also a good point. I was merely referencing his post in terms of hours of actual instructions - not additional time spent studying on his own.

 

As a general rule of thumb, I tended to set aside between two and three hours per hour of classroom lecture for homework, research, papers, and study.

 

But we also have to take into account that out of the 140 hours spent on an undergrad degree, only about half of those are actually spent on classes in the major concentration of study - the rest are core cirriculum and electives - since he is not purusing a tradiitonal route to a degree, those other requirements do not need to be met.

Edited March 6, 2015 by Greg H.

[fiveworlds]

There is a minimum of 4600 hours on some undergrad courses here which is 3 1/4 hours every day for 4 years not including time spent studying. If you are actually attending college and not studying 365 days of the year that works out at approximately 5 hours a day here

Edited March 6, 2015 by fiveworlds

[damian.norton]

This is also a good point. I was merely referencing his post in terms of hours of actual instructions - not additional time spent studying on his own.

 

As a general rule of thumb, I tended to set aside between two and three hours per hour of classroom lecture for homework, research, papers, and study.

 

But we also have to take into account that out of the 140 hours spent on an undergrad degree, only about half of those are actually spent on classes in the major concentration of study - the rest are core cirriculum and electives - since he is not purusing a tradiitonal route to a degree, those other requirements do not need to be met.

 

Ok so 140 semester hours translates into 2200 "real" hours. As you said, only half of them are actually spent on major concentration of study, so that's 1100 "real" hours. As a general rule of thumb, three additional hours per one lecture must be set aside. That comes out as 3300 hours for homework + 1100 base hours = 4400. Lets add 15% as a small "just to be sure" bonus and we get 5000 hours. Basically, I must double my study time so I would get 5k hours per subject. Is this correct?

 

Also, do undergraduates even learn specializations like astrophysics and Quantum physics? How many semester hours (in general) are required for masters and PhD (just for info)?

 

Again, thanks a lot guys. Everyone is being really helpful and nice on this forum.

[Sato]

I wouldn't recommend thinking about it purely in terms of hours spent if you're not studying under the constraints of an academic degree; what matters is really how you spend your time. That is, you may spend a good chunk of that series of one-hour study intervals working on topics or problems which are 1) of no actual interest to you, 2) not actually necessary to achieve your goals, and/or 3) requisite of a continuous stream of several more hours of work. It would be important for you to find where your interests really lay first, and given by how you described your goals ("Quantum physics (Theoretical physics?)", "I want to learn 'pure mathematics' (if that's even a thing)"), I imagine you still have some work to do on that end.

 

Familiarize yourself with the broad strokes of the specific facets of those fields, and then choose what (even if vaguely) you want to pursue, and make sure you're not simply making decisions on what to spend your time on because of what appears most often in television, magazines, or otherwise culture as of high intellectual status. That is not to say that all of the fields you've expressed interest in studying aren't of great interest and profundity, which they are, but chances are that putting efforts towards clearer and possibly more particular goals will be more fruitful for you.

 

Pure mathematics (my favourite topic) is the study of abstractions, and to avoid any confusion, by abstractions I mean "things that exist purely in your understanding/imagination". For example, a common class of abstractions that we as humans access and experience almost invariably is that of shapes and spaces that have position and length and can be twisted and turned and manipulated, and those are which are studied under the mathematical field of "geometry". Another related abstraction, and similarly common, is that of shapes and spaces, but with a focus on properties that remain the same without regard to bending, moving, and twisting of them, like the idea of closeness, openness, connectedness, dimension, and continuous deformation (eg, imagine a coffee cup turning into a doughnut; they're essentially the same object under this interpretation), and this is the field of mathematics called "topology". Consider the idea of a collection of things; this abstraction is studied and formalized as "set theory" and is often considered in fact to be a foundation of the other topics, as a geometric or topological object can be considered to be a set of points endowed with some extra rules/meaning. Consider the idea of a collection of things, but combined with a something, call it *blop*, that relates all of those things to each other; like the collection of planets with a *blop* that represents a planetary collision, and where the results of that collision (a *blop* between planets) is a bunch of smaller or bigger planets, which are also part of that original collection. That's called an algebraic structure, the abstraction studied in the mathematical discipline of "algebra", which can be considered a set equipped with some operation *blop* that operates on its members; to appreciate its generality, note that whenever you see any sort of equation, it is really a structure of operations relating a collection of objects, for example, as the set of real numbers with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division is really an algebraic structure called a "field". These are often combined to study the algebraic properties of shapes and spaces in algebraic topology and algebraic geometry, as well as the geometric properties of algebraic structures in geometric algebra. There are many other topics studied in pure mathematics, which generally correlate to different abstractions, but those are some of the most general / developed ones. I'd also like to give a mention to category theory, which essentially zooms out from any specifics and considers all of these different abstractions to be sets of objects related to each other, and characterizes them by finding valid relations between different abstractions / kinds of mathematical objects; by this, some ideas from mathematical logic (the mathematical study of the abstraction of reasoning), geometry, algebra, and topology, have been shown to be either, in a sense, the same, or very related—it's sort of a meta-algebra where the collection is that of all mathematical objects (at the highest level). Applied mathematics is the application of the results of pure mathematics to non-mathematical problems, as well as any results arisen from the applications themselves.

 

I am not familiar enough with theoretical physics to describe the field in such detail as I did pure maths, but a good and wide-scoped roadmap of studies is given by Gerard 't Hooft as linked to by Strange. Theoretical physics as you've shown interest in is really the mathematical modelling and thinking about physics without direct regard to experimentation; however, elements of experimentation, such as lasers and detectors, are often based upon theoretical developments too, like those original of electromagnetism. Cosmology studies the universe's development on a large scale, in its evolution from the dawn to now to so on; particle physics studies the properties and behaviour of the particles which compose matter (and light) and give substance to the universe, and is, to my knowledge, an essential component of cosmology; astrophysics studies the properties and behaviour of interesting objects or phenomena we observe in space but generally do not have access to, such as black holes, stars and supernovas, unexplained behaviours like those that lead to the idea of dark matter, the movement of galaxies, and so on, which, similarly to particle physics, is of significant importance in cosmology. Quantum mechanics is the name given to a large, well developed, evidently accurate, and apparently paradigm shifting with a spritz of philosophical implication, mathematical model describing much of particle physics; it also has a cool name, which was of course, the primary motivation for many researchers in the field! Mathematical physics, which one might consider a branch of theoretical physics, is the study of physical ideas directly as mathematical structures, where results are made by mathematical proofs and derivations (as mathematicians do); as opposed to just describing the physics by the application of mathematics, it is studied as mathematics itself, and is where string theory and M-theory belong, which are really just mathematical structures closely related and possibly giving rise to the mathematical descriptions that we gave to particles in particle physics. Note that I am far from learned in these topics and this is just a general understanding I've gathered from readings / the internet over a while, which other members like ajb may do better to clarify.

 

To study pure maths you can go from bottom-up foundations (like set theory) or pedagogically introductory material (like number theory, introducing maths by the study of numbers) or somewhere in the middle, and anyway which you (+ an advisor would be helpful) find best for yourself.

 

To study physics you can go by the pedagogically (and probably logically) sound method described in most university course pamphlets, though I've spoken to people who spoke of starting at a higher level being already familiar with much of the maths prerequisite. You can also study physics from a mathematical perspective, taking on theoretical physics from a view of pure maths, learning what you need to studying whatever specific facet of physics you're interested in that way.

 

In either situation, it would probably take at least a few hours a day, and maybe a few days of rest, to really grasp and work through all of the concepts, if you're looking to understand rather than just recite some definitions.

 

I know this is thick, but I hope it's of some use for your pursuits.