Imaginary numbers might describe the universe

C

Cypress

Well-known member
Shorter version: are imaginary numbers just a calculational convenience? Or do they express a fundamental property of ultimate reality.

Imaginary numbers could be needed to describe reality, new studies find

Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have long been used in the most important equations of quantum mechanics.

Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have long been used in the most important equations of quantum mechanics.

In fact, even the founders of quantum mechanics themselves thought that the implications of having complex numbers in their equations was disquieting. In a letter to his friend Hendrik Lorentz, physicist Erwin Schrödinger — the first person to introduce complex numbers into quantum theory, with his quantum wave function (ψ) — wrote, "What is unpleasant here, and indeed directly to be objected to, is the use of complex numbers. Ψ is surely fundamentally a real function."




https://www.livescience.com/imaginary-numbers-needed-to-describe-reality
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Isn't it way too early for math? lol

My brain just looks at this and says "nope." Nevertheless I'm gonna try to understand the article.
 
ThatOwlWoman said:
Isn't it way too early for math? lol

My brain just looks at this and says "nope." Nevertheless I'm gonna try to understand the article.
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My two cents: one has to exercise the brain as much as the body.

Now, drop and give me 20 pushups after reading the article! :burn:
 
Trumpet said:
When understanding the universe, we are still in our infancy.
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That, and also there is a lot we still don't know about numbers, whether real, rational, or imaginary.

I recently read that only a few transcendental numbers have ever been derived, even though theoretically the quantity of transcendental numbers should be vastly more than the quantity of real numbers.
 
BidenPresident said:
I believe the universe is evolving and no single state is definitive. As Heisenberg said, there is no universe without people involved in it.
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I do not follow what you mean.

My two cents is that from the perspective of scientific realism, scientific theories can and sometimes do provide an accurate picture of reality, including unobservable reality. Largely because it is assumed the universe is deterministic, or at least can be understood probabilistically.

Knowledge evolves. Obviously. Newtonian mechanics still works reasonably well as an approximation of physical reality, it just does not account for variable moving frames of reference, which was the improvement Einstein introduced.
 
Cypress said:
I do not follow what you mean.

My two cents is that from the perspective of scientific realism, scientific theories can and sometimes do provide an accurate picture of reality, including unobservable reality. Largely because it is assumed the universe is deterministic, or at least can be understood probabilistically.

Knowledge evolves. Obviously. Newtonian mechanics still works reasonably well as an approximation of physical reality, it just does not account for variable moving frames of reference, which was the improvement Einstein introduced.
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I am not a scientific realist. Neither was Heisenberg.
 
BidenPresident said:
I am not a scientific realist. Neither was Heisenberg.
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In the early days of quantum mechanics, the theory was so weird and counter intuitive, that a lot of scientists, including Einstein, thought it was a mathematical convenience, a placeholder until we could come up with a better, more complete theory of the subatomic realm.

These days, I think most physicists consider the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to be a true intrinsic property of nature, rather than a mathematical gimmick.
 
Cypress said:
In the early days of quantum mechanics, the theory was so weird and counter intuitive, that a lot of scientists, including Einstein, thought it was a mathematical convenience, a placeholder until we could come up with a better, more complete theory of the subatomic realm.

These days, I think most physicists consider the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to be a true intrinsic property of nature, rather than a mathematical gimmick.
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To counter the argument, the imaginary number is a shortcut to solving the equations.
 
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