Adapted from F. Reif’s Berkeley book
Learning is an active process. Simply reading or memorizing accomplishes practically nothing. Treat the subject matter of the book as though you were trying to discover it yourself, using the text merely as a guide that you should leave behind. The task of science is to learn ways of thinking which are effective in describing and predicting the behavior of the observed world. The only method of learning new ways of thinking is to practice thinking. Try to strive for insight, to find new relationships and simplicity where before you saw none. Above all, do not simply memorize formulas; learn modes of reasoning. The only relations worth remembering deliberately are the few Important Relations listed explicitly at the end of the chapters of most textbooks. If these are not sufficient to allow you to reconstruct in your head any other significant formula in about twenty seconds or less, you have not understood the subject matter.
Finally, it is much more important to master a few fundamental concepts than to acquire a vast store of miscellaneous facts and formulas. If in the lectures we seem to belabor excessively some simple examples, such as the system of spins or the ideal gas, this has been deliberate. It is particularly true in the study of physics that some apparently innocent statements are found to lead to remarkable conclusions of unexpected generality. Conversely, it is also found that many problems can easily lead one into conceptual paradoxes or seemingly hopeless calculational tasks; here again, a consideration of simple examples can often resolve the conceptual difficulties and suggest new calculational procedures or approximations. Hence my last advice is that you try to understand simple basic ideas well and that you then proceed to work out many problems, both those given in the book and those resulting from questions you may pose yourself. Only in this way will you test your understanding and learn how to become an independent thinker in your own right.
