In the next week, I have two QM exams; and these aren't the ordinary garden varity exams, these are the full-blown real deal.
Each exam goes from 10am to 5pm, I've never sat an exam which was that long.

For the last few weeks, my life has been nothing but QM.
Kets
Bras
Operators in the Schrodinger picture
Operators in the Heisenberg picture
Operators in the Interaction picture
Commutators
Anti-commutators
Eigen states
Eigen values
Complete sets of states
Cartesian tensors
Irreducable spherical tensors
Spin 1/2, 1 and 0 particles
The Dirac equation
The Schrodinger equation
The Klein-Gordon equation
The Gross-Pettaevskii equation
Hilbert space
Fock Space
Position space wavefunctions
Momentum space wavefunctions
Dirac delta functions & Kronecker deltas
Integrodeferential equations
Fourier transforms
Angular momentum
Clebsch-Gordon coefficients
Time Dependent Perturbation Theory
Variational Method
WKB approximation
Hartree-Fock approximation
Bogolyubov approximation
Non-relativistic approximations
Ultra-relativistic approximations
Fermi's Golden Rule (I and II)
Matrix elements
Raman Scattering
Resonant Scattering
Rayleigh Scattering
Cross sections
Scattering lengths and phase shifts
...

So, yeah.
I'm meant to be an expert on half of this stuff by Monday, and the other half by Wednesday. And of course, that list was only the stuff I could remember...

I just needed to vent a little.

Anyone here feel like talking about QM?

That sucks man....hope you eat lots of food and keep your brain going! Remember to sleep!

7 hours of exam?

It doesn't work

When the teacher enter the exam room again, will you be finished or not? Well, actually you'll be finished and not finished, in a superposition of states .

I've always wanted to study quantum mechanics and all that stuff, but I just never got around it. Guess I should take a second career.

Sure it does! Who told you it didn't?

But we won't notice that happening, because my 'finishedness' state will become entangled with my 'pass-the-subjectness' and then with everything else that happens in the world. So it may be a superposition, but it will be a decoherent superposition.

Well technically there is a compulsory 1 hour lunch break. But what the hell do you do in that lunch break but think about the questions?

I read The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, that was a good book.

Holy crap... is this for a degree in Quantum Mechanics or just a credit? That's just nuts. I've endured 3 hour exams before too, suprisingly if they say it's going to take 3 hours, you're gonna be there for all of it, no way you are gonna get out early . Still 7 hours... I'm guessing it's not Multiple Choice

Well, the smiley was there for something But I won't really believe it until I see it.

But one think I've been wondering since I did a small QM course (though for me there wasn't any exam, just some exercises during the course ) is: how will the transition from current computers to quantum computers be done? And I'm talking about security. With a quantum machine you can hack any RSA encripted connection without any problem. Also, if I understood it correctly, a secure connection must then be done using quantum mechanics, which means that a normal computer won't be able to access the data. It looks like it'll be a chaos

That can be prevented with 3Gigabit encryption Instead of a few minutes it would take hours to decrypt

Isn't there many kinds of 'next generation' computers being developed?

I'm not impressed.

No, you got it wrong: intead of a few miliseconds it'll take a few seconds to break it Actually, with a 3Gigabit encription it's even possible that a quantum computer is able to break the encription faster than the time required for a normal computer to unencrypt it knowing the key

Yeah I recently read something about frozen light computing... very freaky. Apparently you can slow light down... to something like 5Mph That would just be weird to see.

OG: I was being sarcastic

Not that I was being serious, either

Just think, someday you'll be dead.

I've been troubled by this as well. Surely it will be the end of internet banking and that kind of thing - is what I thought.
But there may yet be hope. I've heard that quantum cryptography is already up and running in some places. I guess that the aim is to have a worldwide network of this new unbreakable encryption by the time our dream of quantum computers is realised.

As for how fast a Q. comp. can break the current system, it completely depends of the speed of the computer! There is no way that the first generation of quantum computers will be as fast as conventional computers. The algorithms are much faster, but the computers themselves will be quite slow. (certainly not ~ GHz)

Will he really be dead if we don't see him dead?

Good luck!

My understanding is that quantum computers will only be super fast for certain problems and cryptography is one of them. They still won't be able to solve the traveling salesman problem any faster than a normal computer.

[url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing]

Looks like you really do cover your bases for qm. Nice balance of math and physics

QM is something that is gathering my interrest more and more because of its applications in electrical/biomedical/computer engineering (my field). Physics is always a lot of work. Quite interresting even for the many who manage to pose/bs their way through (if any truly understands what they do).

The two exams are for the first two subjects in my 4 year of physics. This is the honours year of a physics major. For the first three demi-semesters I do two subjects in each. The last demi-semester is completely devoted to research for my thesis (which runs through the rest of the year as well). The subjects I'm doing are
Demi-semester 1: QM A, QM B
Demi-semester 2: Statistical Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory
Demi-semester 3: Particle Physics 2, General Relativity
and somehow I'll have to learn some stuff from 'Particle Physics 1' as well.

I've heard that no one comes out of these exams before they are over...

Those courses you're taking must be nightmarish.

Here we have 5 hour exams on the schedule, but most only stay about half the time... We just flush all our knowledge onto paper, then we think a little harder on each question, and then a third goover. If there something you haven't written by then, you wont get it out no matter how long you think.

Hmm... I don't think I've had an exam that examined all my knowledge on quantum mechanics in one go. Must have been closer to four exams of three hours each over two year, but it seems to cover most of the things you listed.
A lot of the things you mentioned aren't actually that hard if your linear algebra is at the level it ought to be though.

Sounds like a good curriculum! Let me know what book you use for statistical mechanics. I've a few courses on statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, and although I love the subject (at its core, astrophysics is nothing but applied non-equilibrium thermodynamics), I have yet to find a book that treats the subject to my satisfaction. The closest thing I could find was Chandrasekhar's book on stellar structure for 1939...

Anyway, good luck with your exams!

Wow, nice! Good luck!

Actaully, they already did stop light completely.

That stuff sounds cool. I can't wait to study physics.

And are seven hour exams really that bad? My final exams at school consisted of two written examinations of 300 minutes + 30 minutes to choose questions, another of 210 minutes + 30 minutes and a cheap oral one of half an hour or so.

Haven't 'they' been able to transport light (ie, like the Star Trek transporters)?

The aftermath of the exams...
The exams went fine for me, but the emotional damage I took to prepare for them is going to leave a scar. I've been playing through old computer games for the past couple of days and doing not much else. I just don't want the memories to return... I've bored, I'm tired, but yet I can't seem to tear myself away to go to bed before 3am. I feel a bit like that Ethan guy in those Ctrl-Alt-Del cartoons.

I guess that it didn't help to be surrounded by people panicing about QM for weeks. It's contagious; even though I'm good at QM, I'm not immune. Now I just don't want to go back there on Monday...

Get drunk and party!

I'm so glad I changed to a CS. Had a Java exam last Wednesday. I actually enjoyed doing it!

Some of the questions were quite fun: Write a program that displays the first 5 lines of pascals triangle using nested for loops. Write a recursive binary search method to search an ordered array of integers. Write a method to perform an insertion sort on an array of integers. Write a method that takes an array of integers and returns a random permutation of the array, all permutations must have equal probability of occurring. Write a method that takes an integer as an input (eg 12158) and displays the time in this format: "at the third... ..the time will be twelve fifteen and eight seconds." etc.

The only challenging thing about the exam was that it was insanely long for a two hour exam.

I've been much the same since I finished my exams. :S Not done much else other than play WoW. ...although I just got a "You have used your prepaid time for this account. Please purchase more to continue playing." message so I won't be playing for a while.

Fun?

P.s. Why does your avatar have glowing eyes?

Wouldn't you rather hack code together than answer questions about that Quantum Mechanics mubo jumbo? Besides, Java is just like C, if you can answer those in C then you'll have no problem doing them in Java.

Not sure ...maybe for the same reason that dwarves have beards? Do you really want this to become another WoW thread?

He's a night elf

I don't think he cares

Except that Java is much more anal retentive and gives nonsensical errors much more frequently.

EDIT: I sure complain about Java a lot. But that's to be expected, I'm in a high school programming class that uses Java. They switched to that from C++ about two years ago.

No. Certainly not 'exam code' anyway; they always ask you to write some code that is completely useless and pointless. Well, not pointless, the point is to show that you can code; but the actual code at the end of it is not useful. The worst part of those CS exams is that they are often on paper. I think it is ridiculous to get people to write code on paper.
I'm a big fan of programming, and a spend most of my spare time doing stuff on my computer. But I've done several CS subjects at Uni and I felt that they were a big waste of time for me. I've desided that I prefer to keep my CS studies in my home.
But QM isn't mubo jumbo. It's the language the universe is written in; and the aim of physics is to decompile the universe.

Reverse engineering the universe? You better hope God created the universe without any licenses or has copyright on it

Yeah, but we aren't going to modify it in any way; or make a new one using his code. We just want to take a look at how it works. Besides, isn't he all forgiving? We'll just apologise to him afterwards if it turns out that there's a problem, and that'll be that! I don't think he'll mind...

Can you USlers say something about the MIT? Is it really that l337? I planned to study at the TU Delft, that is next to Rotterdam. It should be very good, but I am trying hard to get the best education I can get...

Eeeew! Now, I'd rather do something interesting (ie, quantum mechanics).
Beside that, doing any serious scientific research in physics requires a fair amount of programming already.

I think Delft is good for what they teach, although I've always prefered a general university over a technical one myself. They have some very good people in Delft doing some very impressive work though (Cees Dekker and his nanoscience group are at the top of the world).
I guess it really depends on what you want to study. For general physics, I'd probably recommend other Dutch universities over Delft, for engineering Delft is probably the best. For computer science, I might advise the VU in Amsterdam because of Tanenbaum.