There is a term in psychology known as the Hawthorne Effect, which is when the results of an experiment become skewed because the subject of the experiment knows he/she is being experimented on. Although there seems to be some dispute over exactly what is happening and of its interpretation, it is known among the common population as an observer effect. The truth is, even in the absence of explicit knowledge of being the subject of an experiment or any deliberate attempt to alter one’s own behavior, any act of observation will skew the results somewhat. Even the simple act of giving out surveys to ascertain the extent of a particular idea in society adds new ideas to the population. The participants need not know what the survey results will be used for, or even be aware that they are being surveyed (if the surveys are subtle enough, such as asking everyone paper or plastic at the grocery store checkout and then recording the numbers). Any act of observation adds new ideas into the system that then need to be taken into account. Simply having a recording system in place to record the reactions of people to various stimuli (even if the observer simply waits for nature to create a stimulus and then records the reactions) will put the idea of an extensive recording system into the minds of the observed (it is very hard to keep such things a secret for long). Even passive cameras will be noticed eventually. Also, any observer may also be observed himself/herself by the subjects of the observation, causing a sort of feedback effect in the social system.

In this respect political scientists would do well to learn from quantum physicists, who have had to deal with a similar effect to the Hawthorne Effect known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. To summarize, the principle states that because matter/energy can only exist in whole-number multiples of some fundamental unit (quantum), the knowledge of exactly where a fundamental particle is and the knowledge of exactly what momentum said particle possesses are inversely proportional. In other words, the better an observer knows the position of a particle, the less well he/she can know its momentum (and vice versa). While strictly speaking the uncertainty principle is not an observer effect either, this is how it is known among the common population. One source described it as being akin to trying to measure the frequency in an instant of time of a wave that constantly changes frequency. This is impossible of course, because frequency is the measure of how many times an action occurs over time.

This does not take away from the general point of this entry, however, since ideas in a population of humans can only be inferred from their behavior (until telepathy is perfected). In other words, what ideas are in a population of humans can only be inferred by how many times they repeat an action over time. People are in a state of constant change. Over long enough time spans, whole personalities may be altered. Measuring the state of their personalities at any one moment in time is not possible since they cannot be in all possible situations at once reacting in all ways consistent with their personalities at once. In this way, the analogy from quantum mechanics still holds.

So maybe ideas are sometimes better thought of as waves in some instances, rather than as discrete particles. In this scenario, a quantum of “ideastuff” would be a meme, but it would not always possible to treat memes separately. If this is the case, conventional memetics as we know it might go nowhere after all, never developing into true science.

Because of all this, psychohistory and predictions of the future states of society and culture may reach an insurmountable limit on their usefulness and accuracy. However, this should not deter us from learning what can be known, as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has not deterred physicists from learning how to take advantage of quantum effects to build lasers, superconductors, and quantum cryptographic communication. Political science may yet be on the verge of a breakthrough; we don’t know.