[tvst]

If "i" wasn't called "imaginary" I don't know if anyone would find it weird when it appeared in physics.

In many ways i is as weird as negative numbers, irrational numbers, and transcendental numbers. But we're somehow ok with all of those.

(By the way, I don't mean to imply Scott Aaronson finds complex numbers weird. He's just wondering why not other systems, and even mentions quaternions as an alternative — which could be called weird in their own right... So in a sense I'm attacking a straw man.)

[jojobas]

Negative, irrational and transcendental numbers are all on the same number line.

Getting out into a plane (and losing something as important as the order relation) is radically different from figuring out what other numbers are on a line.

[whatshisface]

Order relations don't appear in QM.

[jojobas]

They do, a lot, just not about wave-function amplitudes.

[whatshisface]

They don't appear in the mechanics, they appear in the things we say about the mechanics.