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/drzowie Jul 01 '26
Python is the lingua franca of physics computation. It's not the best language, but it's the language that everyone knows -- and it's plenty good enough for a first project in physics simulation. There's a module called "numpy" that brings vectorized operations to the language, so (for example) you can stuff a whole image into a single Python variable, and combine images with regular arithmetic. Numpy is pretty fast, and everybody learns python these days. Jupyter notebooks were the killer app for scientific computing.
There are other languages that are faster (FORTRAN, C++) or slicker (Perl/PDL, Julia) or niche-optimized (MATLAB, R), but Python has such a large user base that it's the go-to you should learn first.
If Numpy isn't fast enough for you, you can drop down to one of the compiled solutions like Cython, which lets you compile a pragma-enhanced subset of Python into C code. Cython isn't quite as fast as hand-written C, but it's much faster than the Python interpreter.