Reverse Sokal Hoax: Physics and Fashionable Nonense |
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Written by <a href='/community/profile/68-danieleaton/'>danieleaton</a>
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Monday, 11 November 2002 23:40 |
Article: French TV Stars Rock the World of Theoretical Physics, chronicle.com
Related: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal
Two brothers publish a paper no one seems to understand: "It's an interesting case study in how stuff that is basically nonsense is easily gotten past referees these days," says Peter G. Woit, a theoretical physicist who directs instruction in the mathematics department at Columbia University. "There really was a serious failure of the refereeing here."
However, the French brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, maintain that they are doing serious work that seeks to answer one of the most fundamental questions of all: What was the universe like at the moment of the Big Bang?"
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Who is Sokal? "(Sokal) decided to try an unorthodox (and admittedly uncontrolled), experiment: submit to a fashionable American cultural-studies journal, Social Text, a parody of the type of work that has proliferated in recent years, to see whether they would publish it. The article, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", is chock-full of absurdities and blatant non-sequiturs. "
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