Irrational Numbers Underpin Quantum Mechanics; Removing Them Could Transform Physics in Spain

A man discovers a new mathematical truth and loses his life for it. In every version of the narrative, the ancient Greek philosopher Hippasus of Metapontum drowns at sea, punished either by the gods or by his peers. In most tellings, it is discovering that there are numbers that can’t be expressed as an exact fraction, their decimal places running into oblivion without repeating, like the square root of 2 or pi – greatly upset Hippasus’s peers, the cultish Pythagoreans, who may have tossed him overboard for bringing them to light.

More than 2000 years later, irrational numbers were embedded in the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. The physicists who wrote the theory’s early formulas didn’t have to face stormy seas, but their peers called their work shocking, bordering on heretical.