He even pardoned my favorite underwear.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Who does this threaten Nobody’s job or safety is at stake. What is threatened is convenience, curriculum, and a lot of sunk intellectual capital.Standard teaching pipelines. High-school and undergraduate courses introduce (i) early, then build AC circuits, Fourier analysis, control theory, and quantum mechanics on top of it. Replacing that with pairs of reals, rotation matrices, or geometric algebra would force a rewrite of lectures, problem sets, and exams. Departments and exam boards resist that kind of change even when the new language is equivalent.Textbooks and software. Decades of books, MATLAB/NumPy code, SPICE-style circuit tools, FFT libraries, and quantum-simulation packages treat a complex scalar as a primitive type. Switching notation is not a one-line find-and-replace; every identity, every contour integral, every “multiply by jωj\omegaj\omega ” shortcut has to be re-derived or wrapped. Authors and maintainers have little incentive to do that work.Researchers who treat complex numbers as physically fundamental. The 2021 line of work (Renou and others) argued that real-number quantum theory is experimentally distinguishable from ordinary quantum mechanics. Groups that invested in that claim, and in experiments designed around it, lose a clean “(i) is necessary” slogan if later papers show the difference was only in the composition rule. That is a reputational and framing cost, not a scientific catastrophe.Anyone whose comparative advantage is fluency in the compact complex formalism. Complex analysis, phasors, and holomorphic methods are short. Real-pair or bivector versions are longer. People who are fast in the short language lose a speed advantage if the field standardizes on the longer one.What is not threatened. The theorems stay. Electrical engineers still get the same voltages. Quantum predictions stay the same. Geometric-algebra advocates and the recent real-QM papers are not attacking results; they are attacking packaging. The resistance is institutional inertia plus the cost of rewriting a notation that already works extremely well.