5: If I show you a picture of a ball in the air, you know its position but not its velocity. So you don’t know anything about its past or future state. A real number is like that picture—it tells you something concrete, but there can be additional hidden information.
16: As others have said, starting with positive numbers leads to roots problems with negatives, negatives produce rationals, rationals produce irrationals, and reals produce complex. But *it stops there*. Roots starting from complex numbers can only ever be complex. That makes them even more fundamental than the reals in a critical sense.
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