I've noticed you can almost eliminate complex numbers in timeless physics. I'm wondering if you actually can.
You can always "eliminate" complex numbers, in any context, by talking about ordered pairs of reals (or matrices, or whatever) with suitable changes to your formulas. But complex numbers are often a very convenient and powerful notation. Is there reason to think that if you try to do physics with reals only, it'll look any simpler?
Timeless physics is what you end up with if you take MWI, assume the universe is a standing wave, and remove the extraneous variables. From what I understand, for the most part you can take a standing wave and add a time-reversed version, you end up with a standing wave that only uses real numbers. The problem with this is that the universe isn't quite time symmetric.
If I ignore that complex numbers ever were used in quantum physics, it seems unlikely that complex numbers is the correct solution. Is there another one? Should I be reversing charge and parity as well as time when I make the standing real-only wave?