Irrational numbers have underpinned quantum mechanics for a century. Removing them could eliminate its strangest features and trigger the biggest upheaval in physics since quantum theory began ...

It turns out that imaginary numbers aren’t really needed for quantum mechanics.

For the first time, physicists have built a working version of quantum mechanics without complex numbers — numbers that have been considered essential to the theory for nearly a century. Complex ...

Several years ago one of us, Toni, asked another of us, Marco, to come to his office at the Institute of Photonic Sciences, a large research center in Castelldefels near Barcelona. “There is a problem ...