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Actually it really looks like physic needs imaginary numbers to accurately explain reality.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/quantum-physics-imaginary-numbers-math-reality
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.
This is why some observers have noticed that religion, 'the God of the gaps' especially, is dying and losing any use or meaning, leading to less metaphysical thought in everyday life, that math and physics especially now use metaphysical thought is the primary tool of new understanding and discovery. Which is bringing it back into everyday life.
For some it's the stock market instead of physics. Human brains are wired to invent patterns and meanings in places where there aren't any.
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The problem is they fit TOO well. We struggle to get either relativity or QM to deviate significantly close to their "realms". However, neither predicts the existence of the other, and are incompatible in basic ideas about reality.
Basically, we know they don't align, but we can't access the middle area, and we can't find any useful cracks to pry at within the accessible areas. It's been driving physicists up the wall for decades.
Imaginary numbers are no more imaginary than real numbers. The name trips a lot of people up. If you want to call imaginary numbers "dark unicorns" then you really should say the same thing of the numbers 1, 2, and all other numbers as well.