I love this number, it's my favorite. An imaginary number is a complex number whose square is a negative real number. Zero is beautiful; it's both real and imaginary. But the square root of negative one is my favorite. It's so simple and clean. It gave Decartes fits. He wrote about it with great disdain, as only a French rationalist can do disdain.

Imaginary numbers very much do not work with how we interpret reality. You just can't square a number, any number, and get a negative number. You can't. When you run a polynomial through the quadratic and get an imaginary number, you usually throw it out and stick with the real stuff because it's real, it's reality. Reality is truth is reality is truth. Imaginary numbers aren't real. Right? Classic case of sticking your head in the sand because reality isn't the way you expect it to be, but how it is.

So comes quantum mechanics, and some other stuff, but quantum mechanics is more fun. Quantum mechanics put the Buddhist smackdown on French rationalism. Quantum mechanics lets everyone know, quite plainly, that nature doesn't give a hoot for "real" or "imaginary." The most real (the truth) descriptions of quantum mechanics require imaginary numbers. Complex numbers. The best part? The imaginary number has just as much physical presence as the real number.

So why this over something like Pi, which is irrational? Because it was my very first Buddhist moment. Or something like that. We expect that numbers are real. They exist in ways that make sense because that's what math is supposed to do. And so is gravity, for that matter. Then we sink into the tiniest parts of the universe and we find out that we can touch the imaginary. What we see isn't what we expect. Though Einstein was taken with the idea of photons, particles, and some quantum theory, he couldn't accept quantum mechanics because it did not follow what he knew the universe to be. How can a single subatomic particle occupy many parts of space simultaneously? So not happening. He rejected quantum theory and concentrated on particulate theory and, consequently, got absolutely no where with the Grand Unification Theory, the theory of everything, that he and contemporary physicists have been searching for.

The imaginary number is a testament to the failure to see what is instead of what is expected. To see what is, that would be Enlightenment.

The image hooked to this post is the start of a Mandelbrot set zoom sequence. There are four points, one real and three imaginary.