HOW ANTHROPOLOGY PERFORMED QUANTUM PHYSICS BY ACCIDENT

—with some mischievous assistance from a group of Samoan teenagers.

VITO:
History books will argue about causes. I’m just noting that Stephen Flowers observed that a handful of sharp Samoan teenagers may have heckled their way into the 1960s.

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The Prelude:

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In quantum physics, they talk about the observer effect—the idea that measuring something doesn’t just reveal it, but helps decide what shows up. As Stephen E. Flowers notes in the passage above, anthropology once demonstrated the same principle by accident. The questions were earnest, the notebooks open—and the Samoan kids, sharp as tacks, seem to have caught on to what kind of story was being fished for. What followed reads less like deception than a particularly sophisticated form of heckling—Vito approved. Nobody was harmed, reality stayed put, and the observer still went home with exactly the answer she’d managed to ask for. —Vito Haeckeler

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