Ask HN: What are physicists doing?
In this thread I would like to consult with you, HN readers, about a problem I have with physics. It is a sort of gap between the way I research physics, and the way mainstream physicists do it. This thread will probably appeal only to those of you who are interested/knowledgeable in physics.

A little introduction about myself is necessary.
I'm 22 years old. I live in Israel. My main occupation right now is studying physics. However, I am not a student in a university, nor am I affiliated with any other kind of academic institution. It's been about a year and a half since I've started studying physics in this independent way. I used to be an official student, a few years ago. I was an undergrad in Electric Engineering. I quit there after one year. Then I decided to start studying math independently. I did that for about a year and a half. Then I stopped with math and decided to start studying physics, with the goal of figuring out how the universe works.

So I'm about a year and a half into my quest. I can say that up to now I studied Special Relativity and Classic Electromagnetism.

The thing is, I feel that I have diverted from the ways of academic physicists. Actually, after these 1.5 years it has come to a point where I feel like I'm speaking a different language than the one they're speaking. Perhaps I took a wrong turn somewhere and I'm heading into a dead end? Perhaps the mainstream physicists took a wrong turn and I'm taking the right one? Or maybe some other possibility? I am hoping that you, HN readers, will be able to shed some light on this gap.

What are these differences between me and them? It will take some exposition before I could explain. Some of the things I say about physics may seem wrong or provocative to you. If you feel the urge to tell me I'm wrong, please do it with a thorough, logical argument. If anything seems unclear, please ask. Here we go:

In Newtonian mechanics, life was simple. There was a collection of bodies in different places. Each pair of them exerted forces on each other. There were rules that said exactly how much force they exerted. With these rules it was possible to calculate exactly what the force on each body was. After you knew the force for a body, you could know the acceleration that that body would have, according to the revered formula, F=m a, or in its more useful form, a=F/m. After you knew the acceleration, you could advance the simulation by a small time-step. The bodies would then move a bit, and you would calculate the forces again, and so on.

If you took a small enough time-step, you could calculate the outcome of any physical system to any desired accuracy. All the subjects taught in Newtonian mechanics, such as angular momentum, centrifugal forces, conservative fields, and kinetic and potential energies would appear as emergent phenomena from these rules. They were just epiphenomena to the true axioms of physics: The force equations and F=m a.

That was Newtonian mechanics. In approaching Special Relativity, I expected the same style, maybe a bit more complicated. Eventually that's what I got, but it was hard work, and I had to build big parts of the system myself, with only hints from physics textbooks (more about that later.) It turns out that Special Relativity is just a tad more complicated than the above description of Newtonian mechanics. Instead of the formula a = F/m, there is a more complicated formula:

a = (F- v (F v)/c^2)/(m gamma)

(Where v is the velocity, gamma is some function of the velocity, c is the speed of light and that (F v) is a dot product.)

And the formulas for calculating forces become more complicated as well. I will not list them here, since the mathtext will become too cumbersome, but if anyone will insist I'll post them. These equations are eventually what is called Classic Electromagnetism. All the revered Maxwell equations turn out to be just special cases of these equations.

(Also, in Special Relativity there is the issue of Lorentz transformations: but that is important only if you want to change viewpoints, and even then it can be deduced from the rules above.)

Another note: I know that the system I described is not an end-all model of the world. It does not include Quantum Mechanics, and thus it will be valid only for macroscopic bodies. (It also does not include General Relativity, and thus it could not deal with gravitation, but that is less important in my opinion.)

I mentioned that I had to build most of that system myself, and that physics textbooks don't give this system explicitly. That is the biggest gap between the physics community and myself. Physicists do not seem to accept this system. The equation for the acceleration that I supplied above cannot be found in any textbook, or at least I didn't find it. That is even though it can be easily derived from known equations of Special Relativity. The equation for the Electromagnetic force is almost as hard-to-find, although it can be derived from the well-known Liénard-Wiechert potentials. Why are these things not mentioned in textbooks? Am I blind to something? What are physicists doing, how can they research anything without knowing this system?

About Quantum Mechanics: Even though the system I described will break down at the quantum level, I think it's indispensable for trying to figure out how the quantum world works. It is true that as you go smaller and smaller, the physical reality will deviate from this macroscopic model; But if you want to study and understand these deviations, you should understand the macroscopic model first, so you will know exactly what to compare the physical reality against!

That's my opinion. I may be wrong, and if I am, I would love to hear a well-reasoned rebuttal. I really hope you guys can shed some light on this.

Ram.