The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?

SEP 01, 1998

The philosophical pronouncements of Bohr, Born, Heisenberg and Pauli deserve some of the blame for the excesses of the postmodernist critique of science.

DOI: 10.1063/1.882436

Mara Beller

The hoax perpetrated by New York University theorical physicist Alan Sokal in 1996 on the editors of the journal Social Text quickly became widely known and hotly debated. (See PHYSICS TODAY January 1997, page 61, and March 1997, page 73.) “Transgressing the Boundaries—Toward a Transformative Her‐meneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was the title of the parody he slipped past the unsuspecting editors. (See figure 1.)

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References

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More about the authors

Mara Beller, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.