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Ask Slashdot: Choosing a Laptop To Support Physics Research?

Posted by timothy on from the budget-for-replacement-too dept.

An anonymous reader writes My daughter is in her third year of college as a physics major. She has an internship in Europe this summer, will graduate next year, and continue with graduate physics studies. Her area of research interest is in gravitational waves and particle physics. She currently has a laptop running Win7 and wants to buy a new laptop. She would like to use Linux on it, and plans to use it for C++ programming, data analysis and simulations (along with the usual email, surfing, music, pictures, etc). For all of the physics-savvy Slashdotters out there: what should she get? PC? Mac? What do you recommend for running Linux? For a C++ development environment? What laptop do you use and how is it configured to support your physics-related activities? Do you have a question to Ask Slashdot? Fire away, with details, using our submissions form.

3 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. Anything... by x0ra · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why would she need anything specific ? Any entry level laptop will have more CPU and GPU capability to do whatever she's gonna be asked. I doubt she will end up doing fine-grained world-wide weather simulation or end up requiring building Chromium from source. Hardware-spec wise, this is a pointless question... As for PC/Mac, it is also pointless. You buy Apple-branded products if you want all the Apple coziness and conviviality of OS X, the underlying machine is pretty much identical...

  2. As a PhD in particle physics... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...who spent years at CERN, tell her to also learn Python. C++ is great too. They each have their specialty.

    Mac laptops are very popular and useful at CERN. Macbooks are really popular with Particle Physicists and Astronomers, I think because it lets us run Microsoft PowerPoint (a necessary evil) and linux command-line tools, and write code. Linux is used on the compute clusters there.

  3. Most HEP and astrophysics people use Mac (sorta) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm an astrophysicist, my wife is a high energy physicist. Most of our colleagues use Macs of some sort, either Mac Book Pros or Mac Book Airs (depending how much local computation you plan on doing). However, we don't use them in a Mac-like fashion, but rather install XQuartz and use them as unix-like boxes. The remainder use Linux. Nobody serious uses Windows -- it almost qualifies as a warning sign when you see somebody doing so.

    The idea behind using Macs is to be able to live in a mostly unix-like environment but also be able to run power point or the equivalent -- the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.