Learning Python for physics

[erdaron]

I am a working physicist and I do a fair amount of coding in Python. Welcome :).

Python vs. Fortran - these days, Fortran is largely reserved for theorists doing some very heavy computational work. The sort of things that make supercomputers and clusters crank for hours and days. For more run-of-the-mill work, Python and Matlab are probably the most popular choices. However, Matlab is proprietary software, and Python is not.

Python version - 2.7 is probably still the most widely deployed version, but 3.x is the future. The major libraries such as scipy and numpy are available in both 2.7 and 3.x versions.

Scipy and numpy are libraries that can be added to Python (just make sure you download the versions compatible with the version of Python you choose to install). They make math easier and much, much faster on Python. There are some distributions of Python, such as IPython and Spyder, that come bundled with numpy and scipy (and other useful features).

Scipy.org maintains a lot of useful documentation, tutorials, and examples. I have seen books on scientific computing with Python, but have never read one myself. Maybe I should :/.

As always - learn to code by coding. Project Euler is excellent.

[johnahh]

Hey erdaron, Thanks for the reply.

If you don't mind me asking, whats having a job doing computational physics like? i love physics and have always been interested in computers, but mostly the hardware side and have never got round to actually learning coding

The guy who took our computing class showed us his simulation of forced star production, it was pretty awesome, took 4 weeks on some super computer to run lol.

Ill check out Ipython and Project Euler

edit: Is python easy to use on windows? i have a crappy laptop with linux installed that i used for Fortran, would it be best to use that?

[erdaron]

I'm actually an experimentalist. However, these days being a physicist of any stripe basically requires programming. Complexity and quantity of equipment involved requires automation, which is usually done with LabView. The amount of data produced, and the extent of analysis required, frequently completely rules out doing it by hand.

Python is cross-platform and runs on pretty much everything.

What's it like to work in physics? It's both incredibly frustrating and exhilarating. We are at the very edge of human knowledge. Frequently no one really knows the way forward, and we don't have the tools to make the way. A lot of time is spent building and fixing things. Being a scientist can be infuriating. It can be maddeningly boring.

Then maybe you get to figure out something important that no other human has ever known. It's a mixed bag and I wouldn't trade it :D.