<story><title>How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers</title><url>https://nautil.us/imaginary-numbers-are-reality-13999/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dboreham</author><text>This is only mentioned in passing in the article, but the penny dropped for me when I read somewhere else that you should first think about negative numbers. They seem pretty real, but they&amp;#x27;re not. There&amp;#x27;s no negative quantity in nature. You can&amp;#x27;t have -5 rocks. Negative numbers are just the solution to equations of the form x + n = 0. Now after you let that sink in, imaginary numbers don&amp;#x27;t seem so weird after all. Just another kind of number defined as the solution to some equation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ska</author><text>Lots of replies to you are missing the point I think.&lt;p&gt;You are right, negative numbers are a useful &lt;i&gt;concept&lt;/i&gt; which can be mapped to a number of real world operations, but that in some fundamental way not the same thing as positive integers.  The same can be said of zero, of course.&lt;p&gt;This is probably why it took humans ages to come up with such concepts, the jump is bigger than it seems after you think of this as &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;On a related note, real numbers are far weirder than most people think....</text></comment>
<story><title>How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers</title><url>https://nautil.us/imaginary-numbers-are-reality-13999/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dboreham</author><text>This is only mentioned in passing in the article, but the penny dropped for me when I read somewhere else that you should first think about negative numbers. They seem pretty real, but they&amp;#x27;re not. There&amp;#x27;s no negative quantity in nature. You can&amp;#x27;t have -5 rocks. Negative numbers are just the solution to equations of the form x + n = 0. Now after you let that sink in, imaginary numbers don&amp;#x27;t seem so weird after all. Just another kind of number defined as the solution to some equation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mettamage</author><text>I disagree.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You can&amp;#x27;t have -5 rocks&lt;p&gt;You can have 5 rocks destroyed in the future. That to me, is what -5 physically means: a guarantee that the object associated with the number will be eliminated out of existence in the future and decrement the negative number by 1.&lt;p&gt;Some people call it debt, but to me, emotionally that word feels too financial. So I prefer “a guarantee to be eliminated out of existence in the future “, or something like that.&lt;p&gt;Conversely, 5 cows means: 5 cows currently in existence.&lt;p&gt;5 cows - 5 cows means: I see 5 cows and now they don’t exist any more and there is nothing.&lt;p&gt;I wish my math skills were better, I am optimistic that I’d find a similar thing for imaginary numbers and maybe even complex numbers.&lt;p&gt;With that said, I do get where you’re coming from and I find it a compelling perspective as well. It’s simply that I feel the perspective I described as well.</text></comment>