Being a sceptic right down to the bone marrow, I tend to look down on some of the so-called “facts’, until comes the hard proof that they really are hard facts.
To me, everybody is guilty until proven innocent.
Everybody lies.
There is no such thing as a valid fact.
Until proven otherwise.
It’s no wonder that I don’t believe an imaginary number exists, because hell, its name says it is imaginary anyway. So it exists only in the heads of some fucked-up mathematicians who woke up in the middle of the night many years ago, and decided to make my life (and other engineers’, other mathematicians’, other physicists’) miserable by making up a number which looks as impossible as it sounds.
The motivation behind this imaginary thingy is, for crying out loud, to find a number, which can be multiplied by itself to yield a negative number. You see, multiplying 2 by 2 will yield 4, and multiplying -2 by -2 will also yield 4, not -4. So what is the identical number that can be multiplied to yield -4?
Voila, the answer is the imaginary number of 2, which is notated as 2i. An imaginary number multiplied by another imaginary number will yield a negative number. And, and my friend, that is not all.
I am warning you, these fucked-up mathematicians don’t stop there. There are imaginary planes where these imaginary numbers would lie, imaginary integrations, imaginary addition and substraction (well of course!), et cetera. If you study things unseen by the human eye, such as electrical currents, you’ll see that you’ll have to use these imaginary numbers repeatedly to make sense of those things.
So imaginary numbers help you to understand things. So what? I don’t think they really exists, still.
Until several years ago, when I was in high school (okay, a really loonnnggg time ago), I was watching a TV programme, in which a child prodigy was given a Maths test. This very young child (am I mistaken, am I sexist, but was the child really a girl? I can’t remember..but let’s be sexist and assume the child is a girl) was asked the usual questions, multiplications and divisions of large numbers, etc. She could respond so quickly to questions such as “What is 4788 times 22 divided by 45?” right down to the decimals. Mind you, she looked like she was 6 years old.
Then came the question: “What is the square root of 49?” to which she quickly answered without battling an eyelash: “Seven.”
Then, as my mouth was gaping wider, came the ultimate question which was, of course: “What is the square root of negative 49?”
The child paused for a moment. And two. And three. And finally, people, the answer.
Her answer was one that would still ring clearly in my ears years later: “Uh, Sir? I don’t think I can answer that. You see, to get the square root of a negative number, you’ll need an imaginary number…”
It was later confirmed that the girl had never heard the term of imaginary number before, and she had never thought about the square roots of negative numbers either.
Damn. Damn my ego, I was so hurt by the fact that somebody would think of the real need of an imaginary number, when I was about to believe that it was just a gimmick. If it crosses the mind of a six-year old, then it can’t be as imaginary as I thought. Or can it? Because six-year olds believe Santa Claus exists, anyway.
Being a sceptic right down to my bone marrow, I refuse to believe you have to believe in imaginary numbers. I believe you don’t need to get the square root of a negative number to make sense of the world. I believe you don’t have to make sense of the world, because the harder you try, the more non-sense you’ll create. And the more mess you’ll get.
If anything, I believe one thing might be true: that TV programme about that child prodigy, it was fixed.
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