I feel like this is why physicists came up with dark matter/energy
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Yes, that's explicitly what that is. Dark matter/energy is just the name given to the phenomenon that measurements suggest there must be something else we can't detect yet
There's a convincing argument all numbers are imaginary. I've never seen a million of something in one place. Let alone a billion, or a trillion. Root 2? Get outta here. e, pi. Basically any useful number already has the property that i has (suspending disbelief until we can get rid of it again somewhere later down the line)
Then, when those numbers appear IRL, what do you do then huh??
another tab of acid since the first obviously wasn't enough
Practically everything people say about imaginary numbers you could also say about negative numbers.
Also... wrong about what?
Also infinity and, by extension, irrational numbers.
men will invent new fields of mathematics before going to therapy
Therapist: Do you think your dives into math are a type of avoidance for difficult problems in real life?
Me: You know what's really interesting? I just thought of this, but recipes can be really well represented by a directed, weighted hypergraph. Each hyperedge is an action, the weights are the measurements, and so following the directed hyperedges will result in the meal the recipe is for. It more naturally captures how recipes can be non-linear than regular list based recipes!
Well, new fields of mathematics are useful.
You imply that therapy is not.
Yes.
That was literally what Sir Isaac "Deadliest Son of a Bitch in Space" Newton did.
And despite his being a stunningly weird little guy, he did notice some useful stuff!
It's more complex than that...
cmon, get real
Think rationally
Let's get to the root of all this negativity
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I've always thought "imaginary" vs "real" was an unfortunate naming convention.
I don't know about other fields, but electrical engineering uses imaginary numbers with AC circuits and changing electrical fields. Since electricity moves as waves, imaginary numbers let you represent what's coming 90 degrees later in a compact way.
Carl Friedrich Gauss would agree with you on the naming. He thought the confusion/mistery around imaginary numbers was due to naming. He said +1, -1, and root(-1) should have been called direct, inverse, and lateral units.
Lateral numbers is my preferred term
And in optics, the "real" portion of a material's refractive index represents scattered light and the "imaginary" part represents absorbed light.
don't forgot signal processing. Complex number theory is used a lot when it comes down to Fourier transforms of discrete or continuous functions.
but yea the naming convention of "imaginary numbers" is pretty bad, we did the same thing for negative numbers (we called it imaginary) when people couldn't comprehend of a negative quantity.
negative numbers are defined from a conservative system, basically a gain/loss relationship: if I have 2 apples and I give away 1 to a friend, I have 1 apple left, that loss -- that apple I gave to a friend -- is the negative quantity. For imaginary numbers, we don't really have a way to comprehend an imaginary quantity; what does it mean that I have sqrt(-1) apples.
Yeah, I think it causes unnecessary difficulties. I actually think they're introduced at a time when you could instead teach them as two-dimensional vectors with pointwise addition and a special multiplication and division rule, and prove that (0, 1)×(0, 1) = (-1, 0) using that rule, so that sqrt(-1, 0) = (0, 1).
Then you can establish a convention that you write (a, b) as a + bi (and i = (0, 1)).
This is too abstract for younger students, but nowadays I don't think they learn complex numbers anyway, and I think it would be less spooky for the older students.
Imaginary numbers are typically introduced in a high school “algebra 2” course in my neck of the woods, like junior year unless you are accelerated or held back. I feel like it’s really common for them to not be taught well - the naming is something that occasionally trips up the teachers.
The teaching of them is something that really interests me - they’re the kind of thing that triggers the “when am I ever going to use this?”/rants about not learning how to do taxes. You can talk about the relevance to electronics, but DC electronics is already hard enough for most to comprehend.
I like to connect it to rotation. Show them the pattern of powers of i with physical movement - quarter turns.
Yeah. I think the vectors-first approach allows you to get straight to rotations, too.
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Yep, it is bad naming. I took it in highschool but it didn't really make sense till I saw how it described electric fields with the wave 90 degrees into the flat page.
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This is a thing that mathematicians do. Rather than just assume you can't divide by zero they'll go ahead and try and see what happens.
Just one more axiom bro and it will all make sense... just one more I swear it's consistent... BRO I just NEED one more conjecture and it will BE complete... tHe pRincIPles ARe sOLid BrO jUST TruST mE!
All numbers are imaginary
It's not like the regular numbers behave themselves. Have you ever heard a coherent, non-self referential definition of the number 3?
2+1?
the only numbers that actually exist are 0 and 1. everything else is a reference to those
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