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Imaginary Numbers Could be Needed to Describe Reality

Gord_in_Toronto

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Gord_in_Toronto
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Imaginary Numbers Could be Needed to Describe Reality, New Studies Find

https://www.livescience.com/imaginary-numbers-needed-to-describe-reality

To test how important imaginary numbers were in describing reality, the researchers used an updated version of the Bell test, an experiment which relies on quantum entanglement.

Imaginary numbers are necessary to accurately describe reality, two new studies have suggested.
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Will I have to change my sig? :o
 
Well, to put on my pedant's hat.

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I thought that imaginary numbers have been used to describe reality for some time. The article even notes that they are used in quantum mechanics (the Schrödinger equation) to describe reality.

Here's a video I saw recently that explains the history of how they were discovered:



It's from Veritasium, and I think it's really quite worth watching.

While the numbers themselves may be imaginary, they seem to be necessary to quantum mechanics, which describes reality as most people think.

Of course a description of the thing is not the thing itself.

Are even the so-called "real numbers" actually real? I.e., do the numbers actually exist anywhere as tangible entities? Not really. So the real numbers aren't really real either.
 
Imaginary numbers describe many situations in reality. Any 2-dimensional vector quantity with magnitude and phase can be expressed as a complex number. Electrical engineers (like me) have used imaginary numbers to quantity reactive power (measured in VARs) for a century, and reactive power is very definitely a physical quantity -- it is the power supplied to the electric and magnetic fields by an AC supply.
 
Trebuchet said:
It took me far too long to figure that out.
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I saw a version of it on a t-shirt in passing at the state fair, and did spend a couple full minutes trying to parse it because I knew I should be able to. The moment I did, I had to stop and laugh. I would have thanked the person wearing it but she was long gone.
 
BillC said:
Imaginary numbers describe many situations in reality. Any 2-dimensional vector quantity with magnitude and phase can be expressed as a complex number. Electrical engineers (like me) have used imaginary numbers to quantity reactive power (measured in VARs) for a century, and reactive power is very definitely a physical quantity -- it is the power supplied to the electric and magnetic fields by an AC supply.
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Exactly, they're not especially exotic if you understand that they're not used to measure a quantity. Not all math is about counting and the length of lines.
 
Government budgets have real costs but politicians often use imaginary numbers when creating budgets.
 
theprestige said:
Yeah, but we're talking about using imaginary numbers to describe reality.
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Reality could be defined as that which remains the same regardless of how you describe it. Or whether.

Corollary: Because reality does not actually need to be described, imaginary numbers are not actually needed to describe reality.

If you want to describe reality, however, imaginary numbers come in handy.

And this being the science, mathematics, medicine, and technology subforum, most of us here do want, for various reasons, to describe reality. Which is why most of us like imaginary numbers.
 
W.D.Clinger said:
Reality could be defined as that which remains the same regardless of how you describe it. Or whether.

Corollary: Because reality does not actually need to be described, imaginary numbers are not actually needed to describe reality.

If you want to describe reality, however, imaginary numbers come in handy.

And this being the science, mathematics, medicine, and technology subforum, most of us here do want, for various reasons, to describe reality. Which is why most of us like imaginary numbers.
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You seem to have completely missed the line of conversation you think you're responding to.

To which you're responding.

Anyway, what exactly are you trying to do? Participate in an aside about the fantastical nature of government budgets? Or pull me up for personal reasons, on a point of mathematics I wasn't even contesting?
 
theprestige said:
You seem to have completely missed the line of conversation you think you're responding to.
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If you thought I was responding to lame jokes about government budgets, you thought wrong.

Anyway, what exactly are you trying to do? Participate in an aside about the fantastical nature of government budgets? Or pull me up for personal reasons, on a point of mathematics I wasn't even contesting?
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If my remarks had anything at all to do with off-topic remarks about government budgets, it was to get away from that derail by returning to the topic of this thread, quoting one sentence of that derail out of context because that sentence, when elevated above its context, inspired the thoughts I posted.
 
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