Paper.js Updated 2025-07-16
Paul Dirac Updated 2025-07-16
Eccentric nerdy slow speaking physicist mostly based in University of Cambridge.
Created the Dirac equation, what else do you need to know?!
QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 1.3 "P.A.M. Dirac and the Birth of Quantum Electrodynamics" quotes Dirac saying how being at high school during World War I was an advantage, since all slightly older boys were being sent to war, and so the younger kids were made advance as fast as they could through subjects. Exactly the type of thing Ciro Santilli wants to achieve with OurBigBook.com, but without the need for a world war hopefully.
Dirac was a staunch atheist having said during the Fifth Solvay Conference (1927)[ref]:
If we are honest - and scientists have to be - we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards - in heaven if not on earth - all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.
Paul Dirac and the religion of mathematical beauty by Royal Society (2013)
Source. Bromide Updated 2025-07-16
Initial condition Updated 2025-07-16
Basically a subset of the boundary condition for when one of the parameters is time and we are specifying values for the time 0.
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qiskit/qft.py Updated 2025-07-16
This is an example of the
qiskit.circuit.library.QFT implementation of the Quantum Fourier transform function which is documented at: docs.quantum.ibm.com/api/qiskit/0.44/qiskit.circuit.library.QFTOutput:So this also serves as a more interesting example of quantum compilation, mapping the
init: [1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
qc
┌──────────────────────────────┐┌──────┐
q_0: ┤0 ├┤0 ├
│ ││ │
q_1: ┤1 Initialize(1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0) ├┤1 QFT ├
│ ││ │
q_2: ┤2 ├┤2 ├
└──────────────────────────────┘└──────┘
transpiled qc
┌──────────────────────────────┐ ┌───┐
q_0: ┤0 ├────────────────────■────────■───────┤ H ├─X─
│ │ ┌───┐ │ │P(π/2) └───┘ │
q_1: ┤1 Initialize(1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0) ├──────■───────┤ H ├─┼────────■─────────────┼─
│ │┌───┐ │P(π/2) └───┘ │P(π/4) │
q_2: ┤2 ├┤ H ├─■─────────────■──────────────────────X─
└──────────────────────────────┘└───┘
Statevector([0.35355339+0.j, 0.35355339+0.j, 0.35355339+0.j,
0.35355339+0.j, 0.35355339+0.j, 0.35355339+0.j,
0.35355339+0.j, 0.35355339+0.j],
dims=(2, 2, 2))
init: [0.0, 0.35355339059327373, 0.5, 0.3535533905932738, 6.123233995736766e-17, -0.35355339059327373, -0.5, -0.35355339059327384]
Statevector([ 7.71600526e-17+5.22650714e-17j,
1.86749130e-16+7.07106781e-01j,
-6.10667421e-18+6.10667421e-18j,
1.13711443e-16-1.11022302e-16j,
2.16489014e-17-8.96726857e-18j,
-5.68557215e-17-1.11022302e-16j,
-6.10667421e-18-4.94044770e-17j,
-3.30200457e-16-7.07106781e-01j],
dims=(2, 2, 2))QFT gate to Qiskit Aer primitives.If we don't
transpile in this example, then running blows up with:qiskit_aer.aererror.AerError: 'unknown instruction: QFT'The second input is:and the output of that approximately:which can be defined simply as the normalized DFT of the input quantum state vector.
[0, 1j/sqrt(2), 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1j/sqrt(2)]From this we see that the Quantum Fourier transform is equivalent to a direct discrete Fourier transform on the quantum state vector, related: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110073/how-to-derive-quantum-fourier-transform-from-discrete-fourier-transform-dft
College of the University of Oxford Updated 2025-07-16
A good explanation of how this insane system came up is given at Video "History of Oxford University by Chris Day (2018)".
The colleges are controlled by its fellows, a small self-electing body of highly successful scholars, usually in the dozens per college number it seems. Each college also usually has different types of fellows, e.g. see he university college page: www.univ.ox.ac.uk/about/college-fellowships/ (archive)
The college system does has its merits though, as it instates a certain sense of Hogwarts "belonging" to a certain group, so it might help students get better support for their learning projects from older students, or through the tutoring system. Of course, all such "belonging" feelings are bad, the correct thing would be to make great online tutorials for all, and answer questions in the open. But oh well, humans are dumb.
The college you are in impacts the quality of your courses, because tutorials are per-college. As of 2023, Ciro Santilli spoke to some students of the Computer science course of the University of Oxford, and was told that in some cases where you don't have anyone who can give the tutorial, you instead get a "class", i.e. a P.h.D. student going through question sheets with no interaction in the C.S. department, rather than a deep interactive discussion over the college fire. How can this system be so broken, it is beyond belief
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