How do I learn about Physics, more than just a high school level? I want to learn a bunch of things about physics, from cosmic expansion to the leading GUTs. I, however, don't necessarily want to be a physicist, and don't want to know the math if I don't need to. I just want to know how and why things work in our universe, without knowing mathematically why, as a hobby. How could I do this? Preferably for free. I've watched series like Cosmos (the NdGT version), but I want to delve deeper and wider.  
 A: To put it bluntly: you're fooling yourself if you think that you can have real understanding without the math.
My recommendation for a next step would be The Theoretical Minimum (I have in mind the book by Susskind and Hrabovsky, but they have other formats) because it feeds you only an operational view of the math only when you need it.
That won't give you what you want, but it will give you a taste of how physics is developed and give you a hint about why the math is indispensable.

My other favorite book to recommend to truly interested laymen is Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, because it also doesn't flinch from giving you the real theory and explaining what math has to be done (but it doesn't equip you to do the math for yourself).
A: If you truly want to learn more about the universe and how it works my advice would be to embrace it's language. It isn't too entertaining learning all the basics and such but it really does get fun. 
A good book recommendation to get your juices flowing
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
The book goes into special and general relativity as well as some basics of quantum mechanics. Then at the end there is a bit of String theory (Brian is a string theorist).
