Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by garmaine on Friday September 13, 2019 @03:22AM
(#20959931)
Complex numbers are about rotation. That’s the only odd insight in Euler’s equation. Once you get that, it all falls into place (and in fact starts to explain all the use of complex numbers in engineering).
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Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by creato on Friday September 13, 2019 @01:09PM
(#20964063)
> Complex numbers are about rotation.
Why?
(I'm not denying that it is, just pointing out that like the person I first replied to, you are jumping over the interesting part here and stating interesting conclusions like they are definitions.)
Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by jacobolus on Friday September 13, 2019 @03:02PM
(#20965259)
A complex number “is”† a quotient of two Euclidean vectors in a plane. That is, Z = u\v is the object which when you multiply it by one vector u, scales and rotates that into another vector v. We can write uZ = uu⁻¹v = v.
http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMedalLecture.pdf
https://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/GrassmannsVision.pdf
† More precisely, the algebra of complex numbers is structurally the same as the algebra of quotients of planar vectors.
Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by garmaine on Friday September 13, 2019 @01:35PM
(#20964346)
As I said, "that's the only odd insight." I'm not claiming it's obvious, it's not. but once explained it makes sense and the rest falls in place. Here's a better resource than I can type up:
https://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-intuitive-guid...
Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by xaedes on Friday September 13, 2019 @03:54AM
(#20960074)
Hm does that mean you could say the complex quantum probability is just a probability over rotations?
Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by tim333 on Friday September 13, 2019 @06:55AM
(#20960931)
Well you add up all the rotation like stuff and square the result to get the probability. In the book QED Feynman describes it as adding little arrows to explain it to a lay audience. In physical terms it's probably most like adding waves and then the square of the amplitude or wave energy is the probability but not quite - no one really knows what the actual reality is.
Kinda sorta, imagine that probability has a direction. Interference is then about alignment of these directions.
Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by posterboy on Friday September 13, 2019 @07:23AM
(#20961075)
what does electric engineering have to do with rotation? Generators perhaps run in circles, an inductor is a coil often enough, but a capacitor?
Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by mikorym on Friday September 13, 2019 @07:46AM
(#20961201)
Electromagnetism concerns movement of what appear to be moving circles. If you roll a circle with a pen marker it draws a sine or cosine curve. If you try to draw the spiral of a light wave you get perpendicular sine and cosine curves. Light is electromagnetic radiation and in turn both electricity and magnetism are fundamentally connected forces.
Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by posterboy on Friday September 13, 2019 @07:23PM
(#20967696)
there is no "spiral of a light wave" lol. If anything, I'd think of transversal movement. Ironically I cannot say that nobody has ever seen a photon. But nobody has ever seen an electron. There could be a model in which electrons move transversal (at mm/s), mediated by photons, but I have not looked that closely into it. It's not part of the usual theories.
if you attach a pen to a hoop and move the hoop along a wall, you do not get a wave, you get (edit: what looks like but isn't) sharp discontinuity where the pen touches the ground (https://google.com/search?q=cos%28x-sin%28x%29%29)
Re:The exponential function is a miracle
by garmaine on Saturday September 14, 2019 @09:35AM
(#20970666)
Circular polarized light is a spiral, at least in terms of how we normally draw the vector annotation.