Recent content by Hyperthetical

I'm a student, Masters in Physics at the moment. I also teach second year students how to program computers for science.

I was wrong to think that people in a thread about the burka would not be on some psycho, defend-all-cultures-though-ad-hominem campaign. The killer part is that I was even agreeing with them and got flamed for how I said it. Apparently exploring the issue, on cultural matters, is some kind of...

Wow that is news. An avowedly "anti-globalisation" pressure group says the internet is bad and uses "green" (read "sostupiditmakesmyeyesbleed") speak to justify their irrational hatreds. Go figure.

What about counter-intuitive happiness? i.e. I hypothesize that the world ends tomorrow, but the consequences of making the hypothesis (i.e. attention, self-importance, feeling of purpose) make me happy, while if the hypothesis itself contained any truth, it should make me sad. Additionally...

Yes but you still have to send your friend half of an entangled state in order to perform the instant wave function collapse, making the communication as slow as the slowest part of this process. Its also amusingly true that Einstein, Podolski and Rosen dreamed this up as a thought experiment...

Only Information, the debate continues as to whether information is the sort of something you are probably referring to.

I must admit I have only passing acquaintance with Quantum Info theories (I attended a conference on it at the end of under-grad and it was a little over my head at that stage), but I don't think you can use it for FTL communication, it's only the 'resurrection' of the information that is...

Ah yes, you're right, although superposition and Configuration Interaction are still different, both involve summations over available states but superposition is a general principle of quantum mechanics while CI is a method of solving certain cases of the Schrodinger (bah how I hate those...

No, Mr Goldman is correct, in the cat problem, the state of the cat is completely entangled with the state of the Geiger-counter/particle detector, meaning |cat> = a(t)|dead> + b(t)|alive>, a(0) = 0 and b(0) = 1, but these coefficients fluctuate with time (generally 'b' drops and 'a' increases...

Simple Rules for Public Discourse: If he said "******", and meant by this that the referee was incompetent due to being homosexual, then he should be derided, run out of town or stoned, I'll leave this up to personal preference. However, if he simply meant, albeit in a coarse and ineloquent way...