Effective Computation in Physics

Preface

Welcome to Effective Computation in Physics. By reading this book, you will learn the essential software skills that are needed by anyone in a physics-based field. From astrophysics to nuclear engineering, this book will take you from not knowing how to make a computer add two variables together to being the software development guru on your team.

Physics and computation have a long history together. In many ways, computers and modern physics have co-evolved. Only cryptography can really claim the same timeline with computers as physics. Yet in spite of this shared growth, physicists are not the premier software developers that you would expect. Physicists tend to suffer from two deadly assumptions:

1. Software development and software engineering are easy.

2. Simply by knowing physics, someone knows how to write code.

While it is true that some skills are transferable—for example, being able to reason about abstract symbols is important to both—the fundamental concerns, needs, interests, and mechanisms for deriving the truth of physics and computation are often distinct.

For physicists, computers are just another tool in the toolbox. Computation plays a role in physics that is not unlike the role of mathematics. You can understand physical concepts without a computer, but knowing how to speak the language(s) of computers makes practicing physics much easier. Furthermore, a physical computer is not unlike a slide rule or a photon detector or an oscilloscope. It is an experimental ...