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[kosine90]

Thanksgiving was really a breeze. I didn't do any work for 3 days! That's a record. Life is great. Awesome friends, great classes: struggling in CS, up and down in Humanities, enjoying Maths, liking Econ, and finally, physics is still awesome; quantum is great although a bit disturbing sometimes. 2 more weeks of super hard work (will I really

Comments

[chashiineriiya]

Mmm, I agree.

[salimma]

Yap, two more weeks then it's Christmas break, yay. Do you have any travel plans? I'm visiting a friend in Seattle but we might be coming down to California for a sort-of ad-hoc reunion of a small subset of our batch of ASEAN scholars (my English teacher would kill me for that, even though it's grammatically correct).

Have you read this mathematical fictive work, Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture? It's highly recommended by Field Medallists among others, and is a fun read.

Will be taking Quantum Computation next year so I'm quite curious to know what you think of quantum physics ..

[kosine90]

I like it a lot so far. We haven't learnt much at all, so I can't say much about quantum physics; only some basic probability stuff, diffraction, interference, etc. But I read some popular science books on quantum physics and I think it's really interesting (I think everything on theoretical physics sounds interesting). Still, often what the theory says is different from our intuition.

Yay! Awesome! Now you can tell me stuff about it! I went to a colloquium on quantum computing a few months back. It sounds fun, and there will be a lot of area for research and development in that field, I guess. I don't think I got it completely, though (uhm.. I fell asleep for around one second --probably more-- and missed the important part. then I couldn't follow much after I woke up!)

[salimma]

Oh, no, I have not taken the class yet. Found out about it halfway into the semester, when I was looking for classes to sign up for next semester, and discovered that I could take Math department's Quantum Computing II for credits.. of course, it requires Quantum Computing I which is only offered in the fall, so it'll have to wait.

Intuition and quantum physics probably don't go so well together :)

[kosine90]

nevertheless, eventually you will take that class! that's still awesome.

True. well, at first the reason i liked math and science was the certainty -- i mean, you can show that something is true by proving it. done. nobody can argue with you about it. unlike most humanities stuff which is often subjective and arguable. but it turns out that there is no such thing as certainty. everything is probability. crazy theories, things we can't see, assumptions. But that's what makes it more fascinating, I guess :)