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)
You see pi every time you see a pie.
Pi can be seen in real life (obviously not with full precision, but close enough). Simply make a 1 cm rod on a lathe and measure its circumference, and you'll see it's ~3.141 cm
The same goes for root 2. Simply measure the diagonal of a 1 cm square
Not sure where you'd see e in real life, though (excluding as the base of an exponential, because any exponential can be trivially rewritten with any base)
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?
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
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.
It means you have an orange.
And in optics, the "real" portion of a material's refractive index represents scattered light and the "imaginary" part represents absorbed light.
Well, it applies to all EM-waves, not just radio or optical frequency waves. It also applies to acoustic waves.
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.
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Not just electricians.
3d graphics are all about about quaternions (4d version of imaginary numbers).
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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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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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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!
It's not like the regular numbers behave themselves. Have you ever heard a coherent, non-self referential definition of the number 3?
the only numbers that actually exist are 0 and 1. everything else is a reference to those
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2+1?
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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.
All numbers are imaginary
Then they invented quarternions.
They're useful as hell! I hate gimbal lock, all my homies love quarternions
If math symbols are fancy for-loops, then this is a fancy array?
They're just closure-minded.
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