Imaginary Numbers - July 19 2025

 

Imaginary Numbers

July 19 2025

Instead of truth or dare

I play a game

of true or false.

Either/or

no in-between

As if there weren’t shades of.

As if everything was known

or in time will be.

As if eyes were cameras,

and the mind

a recording device.

But you know otherwise.

Because the light changes,

depending

on where one stands.

Because one’s past

tugs at the present,

filters perception,

subverts memory.

So you proclaim your truth

like a precious work of art

with colours no one else can see.

As if there was no such thing

as the truth;

singular

immutable

open to all.

But some things are,

and stay that way

all across the universe.

Because truth matters;

while you can have your beliefs,

and opinions

are take or leave.

Facts,

as binary

as rain or shine

plus or minus

black or white.

As real numbers

and imaginary ones.

Which mathematicians, surprisingly

simply made up.

Who knew

that even strict logicians

also have fun

playing with the truth sometimes.

We live in a time when truth is disputed, objectivity questioned, opinions carry undue weight. When people in authority shamelessly lie, and the credulous believe their lies. When conspiracies are imagined, falsehoods are embraced, paranoia reigns. And when expertise, instead of respected, is scorned.

Yet while there are objective truths — the laws of physics, things we can measure, facts that have been accepted forever — people also legitimately have “their” truths. Because we’re all unique, and everything unique about us influences how we see: from how long since lunch to childhood trauma.

So while both valences of truth exist, some truths are unassailable. No matter how much some people disbelieve and wish they weren’t.

(I’m lousy at math, but understand an imaginary number as one whose square is a negative. (I may very well be wrong!) The combination of all real and imaginary numbers makes up the set known as complex numbers. Which, apparently, can construct equations that have no solutions yet are actually useful in solving some engineering and physics problems . . . At least that’s what I read and pretty faithfully reproduced here, even though it makes no sense at all to me.)