Bro, if you don’t like imaginary numbers then just don’t imagine them?
You think one imaginary number is crazy? Just wait till you learn about quaternions. One real number and 3 imaginary numbers forming a four dimensional coordinate system. It’s the basis for quantum mechanics and most video game engines. Who thinks of this shit?
The general concept is called Spinors, Quaternions are just one representation. Here’s a great video on them. In physics they’re using them because they’re necessary (video explains), in computer graphics we’re using them because they’re algorithmically convenient, very cheap to compute and ignore that whole half-spin thing. It’s one of those instances where it’s cheaper to compute useless information and then throw it away as opposed to avoiding to compute it.
They’re also absolutely impossible to deal with when authoring stuff, as in rotating things in Blender, it’s just a representation on the backend. Quaternions would avoid gimbal lock but when authoring you really rather deal with that than a 4-dimensional hypersphere.
You laugh now, but just wait 3 years until this morphs into the next right-wing cult conspiracy theory…
God I hate that this is an entirely plausible scenario.
Nah, I’m pretty sure they avoid maths like it’s dark magic
Actually it really looks like physic needs imaginary numbers to accurately explain reality.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/quantum-physics-imaginary-numbers-math-reality
This is why some observers have noticed that religion, ‘the God of the gaps’ especially, is dying and losing any use or meaning, leading to less metaphysical thought in everyday life, that math and physics especially now use metaphysical thought is the primary tool of new understanding and discovery. Which is bringing it back into everyday life.
For some it’s the stock market instead of physics. Human brains are wired to invent patterns and meanings in places where there aren’t any.
Little known fact: the imaginary numbers are the algebraic closure of the irrational numbers.
Is this some joke I’m not getting? Cause yes, real numbers are the closure of irrational numbers, but imaginary numbers are just isomorphic to them.
You’re thinking of topological closure. We’re talking about algebraic closure; however, complex numbers are often described as the algebraic closure of the reals, not the irrationals. Also, the imaginary numbers (complex numbers with a real part of zero) are in no meaningful way isomorphic to the real numbers. Perhaps you could say their addition groups are isomorphic or that they are isomorphic as topological spaces, but that’s about it. There isn’t an isomorphism that preserves the whole structure of the reals - the imaginary numbers aren’t even closed under multiplication, for example.
You’re right, I mixed it up with the complex numbers being isomorphic to R^2. Thanks for clearing it up!
Love btw how I get downvoted for an honest mistake.
