this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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This was one of the points of contention with the quantum revolution of the beginning of the 1900's, schrödinger came up with the equation, which fitted like a glove for a lot of scenarios, but it had an imaginary component, which baffled a lot of people since it could imply reality uses such numbers at a fundamental level
"Imaginary" is just a misnomer. Descartes basically ran a smear campaign against them.
That's actually a good point I had never considered! In a way you could consider that "negative numbers are imaginary as well"
And that's never something I considered. You can't see a negative amount of apples. Must be imaginary!
What's really screwy is you can force light to only travel as a evanescent wave. It's completely undetectable without a second interaction, but light must transmit energy using the purely imaginary part of the complex wave.
The imaginary component definitely has some physical meaning, it's not just a useful mathematical trick.