Imaginary Numbers
Imagine other physicists cringing during 1623 when Galileo said, “the universe … is written in the language of mathematics”. Maybe they should have worked harder learning math, because Galileo may have just been right. The principles of physics that dictate much of the universe’s workings are, in essence, mathematical logic. At least this idea that mathematics describes our reality was actually imaginable. Since then, physics has got weird and mathematics has led into the mind-bending worlds of relativity and quantum mechanics. Recently, things got unimaginably weirder with the discovery that, if quantum mechanics is true, imaginary numbers describe reality. What are imaginary numbers? They’re weird. If the square root of 4 is 2 or -2, because 2 x 2 = 4 and -2 x -2 = 4, what’s the square root of negative four? If multiplying positive numbers yields positive numbers and multiplying negative numbers yields positive numbers, negative four has no square root. But, if we do mathematical magic and imagine a unit, “i”, that, when squared, equals -1, then (2i)2 equals negative four. So, the imaginary number 2i is the square root of negative four and yes, imaginary numbers like this work in quantum mechanics. Did you ever imagine physics getting this weird? And what does it mean if imaginary numbers, which only exist in the mind, describe the physical world in which we live? This is beautiful evidence of the mind of the Creator, who made a world beyond what we have yet even imagined. the universe … is written in the language of mathematics Galileo Galilei. 1623. Il Saggiatore. As traslated in The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966) by Richard Henry Popkin, p. 65. Reference: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04160-4 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.040402 https://www.livescience.com/imaginary-numbers-needed-to-describe-reality
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