77
Scientists Measured a Brain-Bending Version of Time That Shouldn’t Exist
(www.popularmechanics.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
77 points (89.7% liked)
science
20058 readers
629 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Me aged 16 having imaginary numbers taught. It simultaneously made sense but didn't. Thankfully our maths teacher laughed with us at our jaw drops.
let's be honest.
they could have called it complex numbers and it would save the teachers a lot of questions.
I think you may be unaware of how majestically terrible mathheads are at naming things
if they were good with words they wouldn't be doing maths
Feynman was good with both...
Yeah "imaginary" isn't a good name and doesn't convey what they are. No one is learning about imaginary numbers before being familiar with the Cartesian plane, they're literally just another number line perpendicular to the reals. Ironically, one could call them "normal" numbers for that reason. But really any synonym for "perpendicular" would be better than "imaginary". I think "orthogonal numbers" has a nice ring to it.