Quote:
Originally posted by gigi@Jan 16 2003, 01:45 PM
Thanks for that Colin....it's been a long time since I read up on it...interesting...you mean 'imaginary' in the sense that we don't KNOW what happens??
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No, it is an unfortunate fact that the term imaginary was used for "complex numbers". It's not as exciting as it sounds. I believe it was the mathematician Leonard Euler than coined the term. He coined a lot of them.
Imaginary numbers: The square root of -1 is defined as i. That means that i times i is -1.
i is "imaginary".
The basic point is that if you plug a velocity greater than the speed of light into Einstein's
time dilation equation used in special relativity, you get the square root of a negative number. In that sense, the answer is imaginary. What does that mean? Probably nothing. It probably means the equation isn't true for speeds faster than the speed of light.