Recent content by Tez

Well the question is in the title. Does Malus' Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malus%27s_law ) follow automatically from Maxwell's equations, or is it really an extra thing put in by hand? In particular I'm interested if there is a purely classical electromagnetic explanation (i.e. without...

Your income will be enough to live on. As a grad student you generally get paid a subsistence wage. As a postdoc you can get somewhere between 35-60K US. As a prof in the US you are on around 80-infinity K, USD. In the UK pay is a bit lower - go to www.aut.org.uk and look up pay and...

[deleted my comments - suddenly realized why I stick to research instead of forums - its so much easier] I will say (to Dr. Chinese and several others) that ttn, while I disagree with him about many things (particularly the attractiveness of Bohmian mechanics) is spot on in his understanding...

Hi Michael, 5 or so years ago when I was visiting Paul Kwiat you gave me a preprint of how you thought the Born rule could/should be derived. I remember there was a cute idea in there somewhere, though I can't remember what it was! How did it pan out? Tez

The function can take input over x = 0,1,2,..2^n-1 for any integer n. The key is that you are promised that the function is either constant, or it is balanced. "Constant" means that either f(x)=1 or f(x)=0 for every input x, "balanced" means that f(x)=1 for exactly half of the possible inputs...

"d" is the dimension of the Hilbert space, so d>=2. The Kraus map I gave is trace preserving, this is all that is required for proabability conservation. (See Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation", chapter 8 or any other similar textbook for an explanation). I'm not interested in...

A philosophy that underpins many approaches to understanding quantum mechanics (the many worlds interpretation in particular, but collapse models and other related ideas also) is that continuous Schroedinger evolution is somehow `nicer', `preferred', or `more fundamental' than the "damned...

Sorry for slow responses guys - I have a visitor for a week and then have to travel so I'll be here infrequently. Bohmian mechanics is certainly nonlocal, but it does not have an epistemic interpretation of the wavefunction, in the sense that I indicated I'm looking for in those notes I linked...

A note on what I mean by epistemic models, plus the qubit model of Kochen and Specker: http://www.physicsnerd.com/NotesForPhysicsForums.pdf

No, it is consistent - in fact this is what underpins various results in quantum information to do with being able to classically simulate quantum computers built only out of such gaussian operations. In fact these simulations are nearly always done by following the covariance matrix (fourier...

And let me nip something in the bud: The hidden variable models Bell gave in those two papers were not epistemic models - the ontic state space included the full information about the quantum state as well as a hidden parameter. However in Kochen and Specker's 67 paper they give what I would...

Absolutely. Its the reason I am still in physics. Well, I'm imagining things like Beltramatti and Bugowski's non-outcome-deterministic model. Personally I don't see the point in investigating non-outcome-deterministic models, but people do. However I have something stronger in mind than...

Travis, you need to reread what I said about the gaussian world construction. I am not talking about it as anything more than a toy universe model. When I said "(e.g. can it violate a Bell inequality - Which in this case it can't...)" I was referring to the specific EPR construction. You then...

...well then this is silly. Re-read the dice example I gave above. There Alice and Bob will also always get the same outcome (or you can make them always opposite by having Bob relabel his outcomes). Now do you really think there's anything nonlocal going on in that example? Not all...

I agree with the first two sentences, but not the third because I don't really see how to quantify "involves nonlocality" unless we decide on some operational measure of nonlocality (e.g. can it violate a Bell inequality - Which in this case it can't...) Agreed - I think everyone who wants...