There’s a convincing argument all numbers are imaginary. I’ve never seen a million of something in one place. Let alone a billion, or a trillion. Root 2? Get outta here. e, pi. Basically any useful number already has the property that i has (suspending disbelief until we can get rid of it again somewhere later down the line)
Pi can be seen in real life (obviously not with full precision, but close enough). Simply make a 1 cm rod on a lathe and measure its circumference, and you’ll see it’s ~3.141 cm
The same goes for root 2. Simply measure the diagonal of a 1 cm square
Not sure where you’d see e in real life, though (excluding as the base of an exponential, because any exponential can be trivially rewritten with any base)
@glibg10b@Rugnjr I ran this past my (engineer) SO and, after grumbling at being nerd-sniped, he came up with something you could measure to derive e.
He said a capacitor filled through a resistor for a time unit equal to “RC” gives you a simple formula that solves for e.
I think I may have got that right? Most of this is gibberish to me, but he gesticulated wildly and held up random electronic things at me so I think he had something.
There’s a convincing argument all numbers are imaginary. I’ve never seen a million of something in one place. Let alone a billion, or a trillion. Root 2? Get outta here. e, pi. Basically any useful number already has the property that i has (suspending disbelief until we can get rid of it again somewhere later down the line)
Pi can be seen in real life (obviously not with full precision, but close enough). Simply make a 1 cm rod on a lathe and measure its circumference, and you’ll see it’s ~3.141 cm
The same goes for root 2. Simply measure the diagonal of a 1 cm square
Not sure where you’d see e in real life, though (excluding as the base of an exponential, because any exponential can be trivially rewritten with any base)
@glibg10b @Rugnjr I ran this past my (engineer) SO and, after grumbling at being nerd-sniped, he came up with something you could measure to derive e.
He said a capacitor filled through a resistor for a time unit equal to “RC” gives you a simple formula that solves for e.
I think I may have got that right? Most of this is gibberish to me, but he gesticulated wildly and held up random electronic things at me so I think he had something.
You see pi every time you see a pie.