Eli5: why do we incorporate imaginary numbers in various physics equations.

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Eli5: why do we incorporate imaginary numbers in various physics equations.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Its a way to describe multidimensional coupled problems.

For example, in electromagnetics you have two components evolving in time, electric field and magnetic field, voltage and current, charge and magnetic flux. And those two components are coupled together so you need to sometimes treat things as a single complex number that has two components, real and imaginary.

Another example is rotations in 3D space, you have three degrees of freedom, but there is coupling, there are multiple ways to get to one and the same rotation. So to describe rotations there a little bit more complicated type of complex numbers is used called quaternions.

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