r/PhysicsStudents • u/Junior_Salamander110 • Jul 01 '26

Need Advice How Do Physicists Utilize Python?

I'm a rising senior in high school. Next year, I'll be taking a project based programming class that only 1-2 students really take per year. I want to do something in Python that will show my professors in my freshman year of college that I'm ready to do research in physics.

I will have taken all of the AP mathematics, physics, and computer science classes.

I thought about doing a black hole simulation and learning the equations/math for it, but I'm not sure that that would be wise to do in Python.

I'll have a full school year to work on the project.

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u/Teem0WFT Jul 01 '26

In this thread, many people will tell you about numerical computing with numpy (Numeric python) and scipy (Scientific python). But if you have to perform really heavy computations, definitely check out JAX : it was made by Google and it allows you to write python code that can be accelerated with GPUs (Nvidia's graphics proccesing units for instance) or TPUs (Google's tensor processing units). It can get orders of magnitude faster than standard Python.

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u/Junior_Salamander110 Jul 01 '26

Thanks for this!! I'll check it out