• Hugin@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 months ago

    No. It’s more what the previous poster said about encoding rotation. It’s just not a xyz axes. It’s current, charge, flux as axes. The trig is how you collapse the 3d system into a 2d or 1d projection. You lose some information but it’s more useful from a spefic reference.

    Without complex numbers you can’t properly represent the information.

    • ftbd@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      The natural representation would be the transient solution u(t) or i(t). Harmonic solutions are merely a special case, for which it turned out complex numbers were useful (because of the way they can represent rotation). They certainly serve a purpose there, but imo this is not an instance of ‘complex numbers appearing in nature’.