Recent content by wle

It may have come off a bit snarky but it is the reality as far as the value of a high school diploma is concerned. Completing A levels (or equivalent levels of high school education in other school systems) is not a professional qualification. What you learn in A-level anything is very basic...

I did an IB diploma (including higher level physics), which is of similar education level to A levels, when I was in high school. I remember hearing that that could get you a job stapling photocopies together.

It's just a consequence of positivity $$P(\pm \pm' | xy) \geq 0$$ and normalisation $$P(++|xy) + P(+-|xy) + P(-+|xy) + P(--|xy) = 1$$ of the probabilities.

Succinct version, haven't tested performance: from itertools import accumulate def is_monotonic(lst): def all_eq(acc): return all(x == y for x, y in zip(lst, accumulate(lst, acc))) return all_eq(max) or all_eq(min) accumulate is like reduce except it returns a generator of all...

The backslash might not actually end up in the regex, depending on how backslashes are interpreted in string literals. $ echo "^[a-z][-a-z0-9_]*$" ^[a-z][-a-z0-9_]*$ $ echo "^[a-z][-a-z0-9_]*\$" ^[a-z][-a-z0-9_]*$ $ echo "^[a-z][-a-z0-9_]*\\$" ^[a-z][-a-z0-9_]*\$ $ echo '^[a-z][-a-z0-9_]*\$'...

Very little. Certainly less than you say you'll be learning from the course you say you'll be following. In physics most people see computing/programming skills as something that you just pick up and learn as needed. If you have a good understanding of C and Python then this won't be a problem...

I honestly wouldn't worry about this too much. Just learn whatever and as much as you find interesting. Other than having a working knowledge of LaTeX there isn't really any set of computing skills that all physicists have to know. Depending on what you actually do in theoretical physics you may...

I don't see how this makes sense. I mean, if you look up what "entanglement entropy" is on, e.g., the Wikipedia page, you'll find out that the entanglement entropy of a bipartite entangled pure state is nonzero and that the entropy is the same regardless of which reduced state...

They are not only both mixed but both have the same spectrum (eigenvalues). This is a simple consequence of the Schmidt decomposition: given any bipartite pure state ##\lvert \Psi \rangle## living in some Hilbert space ##\mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{A}} \otimes \mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{B}}##, it is always...

Well in general there are multiple ways of expressing any given Bell inequality due to equality constraints satisfied by the probabilities. For instance, in the setting that CHSH is defined in (2 parties each do 2 different possible measurements each with 2 possible outcomes), in a hypothetical...

Well his inequality is just Bell's one expressed in a different way. So it is violated in the same circumstances that Bell's one is. Incidentally, Bell's original inequality is just a special case of a more general one called CHSH that was derived a few years later. You can derive Bell's...

As far as programming languages are concerned, the way to avoid this is to make a point of learning several different programming languages and, particularly, languages that promote different ways of thinking about programming (e.g., learning the trinity of C++, Java, and C# doesn't count). A...

If you have a bunch of items you need to rearrange and you know where they need to go then this is the optimal thing to do. I am not sure about the terminology people are using here but if you want to rearrange objects to their correct locations (and you know what that is in advance) then you...

Couple of things: 1) While Python (or rather 64-bit IEEE floats) can represent neither the numbers 25.15 nor 25.149999999999977 perfectly precisely, it can represent them both closely enough to distinguish them: >>> x = 25.15 >>> y = 25.149999999999977 >>> x == y False >>> x - y...

If you consider it an "operator" then it's a rather odd one (or one treated in a very special way by the Python interpreter) in that it takes as a second operand something that is not a Python object. This means for example you can't do x = turn car.x() as an alternative way of doing...