Hi,

First I congretulate you for keeping your curiosity. Its impressive.

The task you are facing is a formidable one. If you want to siply enjoy physics and understand some of the concepts - I would suggest the three immortal volumes of Feynman. They are pleasure to read.

If you are focused on understanding the Higgs mechanism then the road ahead covers some QM and QFT, I studied QM many years ago and I do not teach it so it is hard for me to recommend. Dirac's book was a pleasure to read and was a good introduction. Harry Lipkin's quantum theory for pedestrian offers a very nice introduction. I find it hard to recommend one of the new books as I read them from a different perspective. You may be able to skip some stuff and go to one of the books offering introduction to particle physics. Perkins is a classical book and is used all over the world. I like David Griffiths bood on elementary particles (actually his qm BOOK IS ALSO GOOD.... AND A GOOD qm BOOK IS qm DEMISTIFIED AS WELL AS ITS SEQUEL qft DEMISTIFIED. ups. So here are only few good books. You'll have to refresh your math also.

Hope you'll enjoy t

It's nice that you are interested in physics! :) How you should approach your studies depends a bit on how much time you intend to spend.

If you intend to spend hours a day for months or years, I suggest that you go down to your local university and talk to someone there (responsible for students for example) and ask for good literature, and maybe they can even give you some other material such as exercises as well. If you have not studied physics (or maths!) at university, it is a long way to go until you reach particle physics though. Even more so if you have not done a lot of maths. A commonly used "bible" in particle physics is "an introduction to quantum field theory" by Peskin and Schroeder. That one contains bigger part of the mathematical framework for particle physics, but you will probably need to read up on some quantum mechanics and maths before you can follow peskin and schroeder. Bear in mind that it may not be the most pedagogical book ever, but great as a reference. For learning there may be better books. But to be frank, I don't think there is an easy way to understand the beast that is QFT. :P

if you don't want to invest that kind of time, it will be hard to actually understand the mathematical framework behind particle physics. At that point maybe better to do a bit more popular reading (ie not directed at to-be researchers). I think most of the books that Ehud suggested fall in this category, but I am not familiar with them, so I am not sure.

To actually do meaningful research, you would have to go full time I think, and find a university to teach you.

Good luck! :)