Table of Contents

Traditional Roadmap

Most universities follow the traditional roadmap, which follows the historical "order" of the theories.

Theoretical Physics

Classical Mechanics kinematics, forces, circular motion, energy, momentum, rotations, harmonic motion, Newton's laws, Lagrangian Mechanics, Hamiltonian Mechanics, phase space, configuration space
Electrodynamics Coulomb's Law, electric circuits, Maxwell's equations
Special Relativity Minkowski space, time dilation, proper time, Lorentz group, Poincare group, inertial frames of reference
Quantum Mechanics double slit experiment, Schrödinger's equations, canonical commutation relations, particle in a box, perturbation theory, Heisenberg picture, tunneling
Quantum Field Theory Klein-Gordan equation, Dirac equation, second quantization, scattering theory, path integral formalism
General Relativity Einstein equation, Schwarzschild metric

Mathematics

There are several math topics that are usually learned parallel to the theories:

Classical Mechanics
trigonometric functions, differential calculus, integral calculus, differential equations, variational calculus, Legendre transforms
Electrodynamics
vector calculus, complex numbers, systems of linear equations, linear algebra, Fourier transforms
Special Relativity
group theory
Quantum Mechanics
Hilbert spaces, special functions
Quantum Field Theory
Taylor approximations, distributions, Greens functions
General Relativity
differential geometry

Experimental Physics

In addition, there are other topics that are often covered in "experimental physics" courses: