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Physicists say quantum mechanics may not need imaginary numbers after all
Physicists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have examined a fundamental property of quantum mechanics in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). In the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, they show that this theory does not necessarily need to be formulated with …
The article mentions that the new approach eliminates the need for imaginary numbers, but it doesn't explain how this would affect the practical calculations physicists currently use in quantum computing or spectroscopy. If imaginary numbers are truly dispensable, why haven't these alternative formulations been adopted in the field despite decades of successful use?
That's exactly the part that's frustrating - they're promising a way to do quantum computing without imaginary numbers but not saying how the actual algorithms would change, which is where the real impact would be. If you can't make the mathematical machinery work the same way, you're just changing the labels on the same calculations.
The article mentions that the new approach eliminates the need for imaginary numbers by using real-valued mathematical frameworks, but it doesn't address whether this means the standard quantum mechanics formulations we've been using for decades were fundamentally wrong or just computationally convenient. If the imaginary numbers were just a mathematical tool rather than representing something real, does that change our understanding of quantum superposition?
The researchers seem to be conflating mathematical convenience with fundamental necessity - if they can reproduce all the same experimental predictions using only real numbers, then the imaginary numbers were probably just a computational tool rather than a reflection of reality. This reminds me of how physicists initially resisted accepting that entropy was a fundamental property rather than just a measure of our ignorance about molecular states.