Thanks for the tip. I'm thinking maybe I should at least register for a few pre-requisite courses and see what happens. I did have a Math Master degree but I forgot pretty much everything except SV Calculus and basic Matrix computation. Or I could just use Coursera to advance my learning -- for hell, the topics I'm interested in, e.g. General Relativity, do not need experiments so I might not even need a degree.

Regarding the last paragraph -- yeah I recalled that my first programming adventure was Foxbasing in the mid 90s. I definitely forgot all of those!

Good luck to you too.