The article was weird because it implied you couldn’t do without them, before backing off. ‘Physicist says math with imaginary numbers is more beautiful than alternatives.’
Exactly. We can replace the use of imaginary numbers with matrix operations.
Schrödinger himself was annoyed by the imaginary part in his equation. In a letter to Lorentz on 6 June, 1926, Schrödinger wrote:
What is unpleasant here, and indeed directly to be objected to, is the use of imaginary numbers.ψ is surely fundamentally a real function”.
Surely he knew that he could have done without imaginary numbers.
The article was weird because it implied you couldn’t do without them, before backing off. ‘Physicist says math with imaginary numbers is more beautiful than alternatives.’
Exactly. We can replace the use of imaginary numbers with matrix operations.
Schrödinger himself was annoyed by the imaginary part in his equation. In a letter to Lorentz on 6 June, 1926, Schrödinger wrote:
Surely he knew that he could have done without imaginary numbers.