a solid understanding of highschool level physics would probably go a long way. most of the population hasn't taken college level physics and doesn't remember most of it if they did. any highschool physics textbook would be a great place to start. you can probably find some older ones for dirt cheap online (it hasn't changed much).

and when specific things come up that do involve higher level physics, having that foundational understanding will give you the a big edge.

r/AskPhysics is a great place too

Fun stuff from a physics point of view would be to have her realize she did some wormhole space warp thing, but of course her not knowing exactly what happened or how. Maybe mention 'one of those Einstein-Rosen bridges you see in the movies'.

Maybe at first, have her check out what physics are actually working. In a bewildered state, knowing she just did a wormhole thing to some other place or other dimension, just do a basic set of observations. "Ok, I can walk around, push off the floor with my feet, the floor has an equal and opposite push on my feet, we have Newton. Gravity works, we have Einstein. I can see things, E&M works, we have Maxwell."

Later, when she sees magic, she can be astonished thinking about "you made something move, how is momentum conserved there, where did the change in momentum balance out" and if an object suddenly appears through magic "how is mass conserved, where did this mass come from" and of course "where is this energy coming from, how does it balance out".

As she explores the world, as you said, have her stick to the Scientific Method, have her experiment all the time, with every piece of magic. She makes guesses at how things work.

One fun thing might be that the magic can tap into the future and past, and use momentum from a future event, and that things do not conserve and balance instantly, but eventually will over time. You can build up an energy debt (or surplus to use later), a momentum debt (or surplus). Hell, that could be the goal of a protagonist in this realm, they are storing up energy and momentum to use at a future time for a big bad goal.

Most importantly, she doesn't have to figure everything out, especially not right away. Science is all about discovering new and unknown things, and answers are always easy not do they come right away. It takes years to understand something.

you can get a list of courses for an undergrad degree at basically any university website (here is MIT https://catalog.mit.edu/schools/science/physics/#subjectstext)

but in a nutshell, you take Newton's laws (kinematics, etc, rotational stuff, torques, statics, dynamics), classical mechanics (lagrangians, hamiltonians), E&M (lots of E&M, maxwell's equations), thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics (but really, at a very introductory level for a bachelors - a full year but still basic), maybe solid state, I took an option for nuclear physics (prof was ancient, the text was a 35 year old book lmao).

I’m planning for Della to be a physics major who has a bachelor’s degree

The plot never forgets she’s a scientist first, mage second, and her experimentation and methods with magic are what help her become a powerful mage though the first season of the show

A bachelor's degree isn't much. Most students with just a bachelor's degree don't really have strong fundamentals of experimental methodology (I know from experience). But they are on the way to getting there, and will usually learn (or fail) during their master's or PhD thesis work.

Della, the main character, is a bit of an awkward autistic nerd and one of her first moments in this new world she’s found herself in include jokingly warning a tiger-like predator that she wouldn’t be worth the effort of eating because her thermal energy input wouldn’t be worth the output of cashing her down. Which is cringe and bad

It is cringe and bad, and that behaviour gets beaten out of physics students very quickly usually. Don't confuse the behaviour you see on Big Bang Theory for how physicists actually are.

but I don’t think government blacksites often hire artists to work on super secret otherworldly experiments. 

They also don't hire bachelor's degrees to do any scientific work, because those only know physics up to like 1930.

If this show has any money at all, this would be the kind of thing you hire a consultant for: an expert you can book periodically to bounce ideas off of, who can explain the way things would actually work. Then you can choose to incorporate those ideas or not, depending on what your story needs, and how realistic you want things to be.

Two words to integrate physics into the character, "exhaustion" and "masochism"

This sounds fun! I took a science fiction writing class in college that required us to apply real science concepts to the short story we wrote. Everyone was science majors so the concept part wasn't hard, but writing something creative and applying the science took some time.

Anyway, as someone else mentioned, a Bachelors would never be enough for this person to have developed the skills that require her to study this new magical word. I highly suggest she be in her PhD for biophysics or something along those lines. Lots of PhD students do internships at national labs which sounds like a place that could involve some crazy portal the government is keeping secret from us. The other thing I would say is when she goes through the portal, maybe there is some crazy immense pain from her atoms literally being sucked into the portal one by one. Maybe during her travel to the magical place, she feels what it means to be everything and nothing because atoms make up everything but without anything bonding them together, they're nothing, just atoms. Then when she gets to the magical place, she's left wondering wtf just happened and meets some friendly creature who has been studying other worldly dimensions and they become friends, learning from eachother and getting into BS bc the government there is trying to get Della and hide her from their world! Idk sounds cool and just spit balling.

Im a phd student in Materials Science, i play roller derby, queer, and love reading fantasy/science fiction. Idk but your character resonated with me in some way! I hope it works out and we get to read it some day once its completed :) best of luck.

You could do worse than to look to the MCU for inspiration. A number of their characters are scientists or intellectuals who become magic users or superhumans: Stephen Strange, Bruce Banner, Tony Stark, Peter Parker, Norman Osborn, Otto Octavius, Reed Richards, Victor Von Doom.

I think the fun way of doing this is having the character just test stuff and see what happens. This is how physicists actually work.

You've got a "mage". So they're gonna be casting fireball or something. Have them do a little tiny fireball. Then a slightly bigger fireball. Then a fire oval. Then a fire line. Then "well if that works, shouldn't this?" where they sort out everyone getting appropriate safety equipment and try making a massive fireball and it just doesn't work at all. Then they sit down for a while with a bit of paper and try to think about why that didn't work.

Then, when they finally need it they can do the really big fireball or make an otter out of magic fire or whatever.

They're a wizard, no-one gives a shit how accurate the physics actually is. Make them a physicist.

This is what research physics is like.

If you know anyone who has studied college level physics you could always ask them about specific questions, or even email a physics professor from your college.

Read up on the scientific method, should help you write how this character approaches trying to empirically determine the natural laws of this magical world. You probably don't need to go in depth on any specific, real science topics. But it could be compelling if you call out certain features of "real" physics that the character is looking for in magic. Spitballing some ideas: * Are there any quantities that are conserved (i.e. can't be created or destroyed) such as energy, momentum, mana? * Are there any rules for what magic does "on its own" i.e. inertia in chassical mechanics, heat traveling from high to low temperature in thermodynamics * Are there any new types of forces/fields? * Is magic quantized * Is there some way to convert between magic and other things, analogous to mass-energy equivalence (e=mc²⁾

Could be fun if she specializes in a very unpopular subfield that is very unlikely to be directly useful in her adventures, so (a) it is a beat that at some point she gets super excited she gets to finally use some of her specialty, and (b) it is plausible she would need to talk things over with herself to get things straight, for the benefit of the reader, rather than doing the math in her head automatically, which she might do for problems in her wheelhouse.  Something like String physics, or fluid dynamics specifically for the cores of stars.