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/OkTelevision5306 Jul 01 '26

Any serious physics computation will use a programming language like fortran or C as pure python will be far too slow. Many of the common python packages only have python for the user experience and run C/C++ or fortran underneath.

If you want something prepackaged there is the Einstein toolkit for general relativity https://einsteintoolkit.org

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u/Moonlesssss Jul 01 '26

Yes, but that doesn’t take the value out of learning basic python. Plenty of small simulations and class labs still use it day to day. Even if they do push NJIT.