In a recent paper by Ben-Zion et al. (2024), titled “Leveraging AI for Rapid Generation of Physics Simulations in Education: Building Your Own Virtual Lab”, the authors make a thought-provoking statement: “While we are not at the stage of ‘Computer: make me a mathematical simulation depicting the quantum wave functions of electrons in the hydrogen atom,’ we are not far off.”
This statement immediately caught my attention, especially given the rapid advancements in AI. I decided to put it to the test. Using the exact prompt from the paper – “Computer: make me a mathematical simulation depicting the quantum wave functions of electrons in the hydrogen atom” – I fed it into VS Code’s Copilot Agent, powered by Claude 4.
The result? A fully functional Jupyter notebook that generates precisely that simulation! This experience highlights just how quickly the “not far off” future is becoming our present reality.
Before diving into the interactive simulation, let’s look at some of the visualizations generated by the notebook:
Radial Probability Distributions
3D Orbital Shapes
2D Cross-Sections
Below, you can view the rendered notebook on nbviewer.jupyter.org or access the raw notebook file on GitHub:
View Notebook on nbviewer.jupyter.org
Download Raw Notebook (.ipynb)
You can find the full code and more details in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/vladimirlopez/Hydrogen-Atom
References
Ben-Zion, Y., Einhorn Zarzecki, R., Glazer, J., Finkelstein, N. D., et al. (2024). Leveraging AI for Rapid Generation of Physics Simulations in Education: Building Your Own Virtual Lab. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07482