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

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.

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

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

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

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

Not that I was being serious, either

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)

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]

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...

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!

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.