Your Intuition About Reality Is Wrong. A 16th-Century Mathematician’s ‘Barbaric’ Invention Proves It.
A 16th-century mathematician called his method for solving equations ‘barbaric’ because it used √-1, a number he considered meaningless. Four centuries later, that same ‘imaginary’ number was discovered to be essential to quantum mechanics — proving that human inventions can reveal universal truths, and that our concept of reality is far more flexible than we assume.