this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
264 points (89.8% liked)
Science Memes
10752 readers
1601 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- !reptiles and [email protected]
Physical Sciences
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and [email protected]
- [email protected]
- !self [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Memes
Miscellaneous
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
Imaginary numbers are a rotational operator.
You don't need quantum mechanics to observe rotation in the real world.
The meme wasn't about imaginary numbers, but irrational numbers like pi or the swuare root of 3. Mathematicaly, those numbers have mever ending decimals that never repeat. But quantum mechanics doesn't allow for any measurements smaller/more precise than the planck scale. The quantum nature of the universe means that no object in the universe can have an irrational length.
An easy way to picture this is a right triangle. I can make said triangle with two sides that are exactly 1 meter long, all the way down to the planck length. The hypotenuse is theoretically exactly the square root of 2 meteres long, but that is impossible because part of that triangle would have to exist beyond the quantum realm.
i is a rotational operator. So equations with i in them have pi encoded into them too.
Trying to expand a quantized rotation into a quantized linear coordinate is attempting to square a circle.