Quanta Magazine: Physicists Take the Imaginary Numbers Out of Quantum Mechanics

The feasibility of real-valued quantum theory raises provocative questions. Foremost among them: Why is it so much more complicated? The question has been with us since the birth of quantum mechanics; Schrödinger attempted to work with a real-valued wave equation but turned to a complex one because it was “extraordinarily much simpler for computational purposes,” as he described it in his notes.