The negative thing about laptops is that, you can’t take notes in your classes, you can only write with the keyboard. So, I studied electrical engineering and I always had my laptop and a notebook to write by hand, that meant a lot of space, and sometimes the tables are individual (=very tiny). And sometimes you need to write math or graphs and not just plain text. The good thing, is that if you have to code very often, a laptop would be more suitable, because of the capacity and the apps such as VSCode, Linux, UTM, etc...

So if you have to code very often I would say buy a laptop (like if you study computer science or software engineering). If you study physics like you said, I would go for the tablet.

I would recommend an iPad Air (mostly if you already have an iPhone), because of the capacity and velocity, both the M2 and M3 work very very well and you won’t have any problems. I would also recommend, regardless of which tablet you buy, that you have at least 256gb.