Heisenberg or Hindenburg?

Picture this: you are at a party, and have become the center of a conversation. Why wouldn’t you? Acupuncturists are fascinating! You are chatting with a mixed group, including some trained scientists. You decide to sound like a champ by mentioning something along the lines of how acupuncture research may be limited because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (which you heard somewhere). Suddenly, the scientists’ eyebrows furrow, they look down and smile, and excuse themselves. You have just inadvertently confirmed your listener’s assumption that acupuncture is pseudo-science. Why? What is it about mentioning Heisenberg that makes a perfectly nice conversation go down in flames like a giant flaming hydrogen-filled dirigible from the late 1930’s?

There is a risk involved when you start to explain your work using terms that come from other disciplines. If you are going to reference concepts from physics, it is always a good idea to look them up beforehand. In the case of Heisenberg and his popularly referenced principle, there is a widespread misunderstanding among the general public about what it is and what it says.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot measure the position and the momentum of a particle to the same degree of precision, and that when one is measured more accurately, the measurement of the other becomes less accurate. The Principle discusses the measurement of two physical properties that are understood and can be quantified on their own, but not together. Most of us do not reference Heisenberg to say that science cannot measure two physical properties of acupuncture at once (what does that even mean? Hence, the furrowed brow at the cocktail party…).

What we are trying to say when we bring up Heisenberg is something along the lines of how the very act of trying to measure the flow of energy in acupuncture introduces an outside energy that changes the whole system. That is to say, that one cannot measure the flow of energy without changing it by the act of measurement itself. This is correctly called the Observer Effect in physics, and it is a valid consideration when talking about the potential limits of acupuncture research with the tools and methods we have available to try to understand and quantify Qi.

This may seem like a small thing, but as long as acupuncturists are going to try to validate and explain what they do with words borrowed from other disciplines, in behooves us to be as accurate as possible. The conflation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect has been around for a long time in popular usage. And while we as a profession were certainly not the cause of the confusion, we look good if we demonstrate that we are educated about the difference.