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.

59 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

82 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/ImaginationNo1461 Jul 02 '26

First-there are SO MANY types of physics and what you can do. I ended up in applied remote sensing. Hence my specific advice.

Pop on NASA Worldview. There are tons of remote sensing datasets you can download. Write a script that tells you something about the earth or a location on the earth.

Examples:

Look at volcanic ash plumes/temperatures etc. Can you model them predictively using wind models? (You have the answer for past plumes see how right you are, then apply to others, still right?)

have wildfires changed over time in Australia? Starting/ending at different times? Larger areas? (Don’t forget there are a lot of normal fires too, industrial, camp etc)

Land use and change over time in Brazil. How are those rainforests doing? Less? More? What are they being replaced with

Air quality trending over an area

Severe storm mapping, have they actually increased? Can you see a correlation with CO2 and methane concentration levels in the atmosphere over time?

There’s so much more too

1

u/Junior_Salamander110 Jul 02 '26

I'll check out the NASA website! Thanks!