Author: Haroon Khalil
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What can i expect of the curriculum?
Students will take compulsory core courses and choose from a range of elective courses. In the final year, many also complete a Graduation Project (see below). The core courses provide foundational training in how sociologists frame questions about the social world. Students learn about the methodologies sociologists use in empirical research and receive training in both qualitative and quantitative methods. These courses…
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What can I do with a sociology?
Our graduates go onto a wide range of sectors and many different types of jobs:
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Why should become a Sociology major?
Consider a Sociology major if you are especially interested in exploring different ways to look at and talk about social, political, and economic issues, and in reconsidering things that are taken for granted. The ethos of this discipline is that rigorous research and empirical knowledge of the world can contribute to solving its problems. No…
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What is Sociology?
Sociology is the study of social relations, how they are formed and what their consequences are. Sociologists observe how people relate to one another, why they behave in similar or different ways, and how individual actions are linked to collective actions. We look at how cultures develop, how organizations function or don’t, how states and…
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What’s quantum computation?
It’s designing a system where quantum states constructively interfere to produce the right answer. SMBC’s “The Talk” is an astonishingly good introduction. I heard that quantum computers try all the possible answers at the same time. That’s only part of how quantum algorithms work. You can certainly put a quantum computer into a uniform superposition of inputs…
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What is wave function collapse?
As humans, we never perceive superpositions of matter waves. There are lots of different ideas about why that should be. One of the oldest, called “the Copenhagen interpretation” after a conference where lots of famous physicists met to talk about quantum physics, is that somehow when we measure a quantum system, the wave function undergoes…
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What’s a wave function?
A wave function is a function from classical configurations to complex numbers. You can think of it as an infinite list of complex numbers, where the index into the list is given by the configuration. The Schrödinger equation describes a single spinless particle, where a configuration is an element of ℝ³, a set of coordinates…
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What’s an observer?
An observer is any quantum system separate from the system being observed that becomes entangled with it during the measurement process. An observer can be as small or as large as you like, from an electron to a human, to a galactic cluster. See this comment for an analysis of the double slit experiment with a single…
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So, is scale the only difference between quantum and classical physics?
At a very basic level, we could say that quantum physics is used to describe the microworld, while the macroworld is governed by classical physics. However, many macroscopic objects can be described with quantum physics – you just have to know where to look.
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What’s a measurement?
In order to make a measurement, we need a quantum system X to be measured and a quantum system Y (“the observer”) to serve as the record of the measurement. The measurement itself is any physical process that makes the state of Y depend on X. If the state of X is not an eigenstate…