The Sokal Affair — a physicist’s nonsense paper that a journal printed in earnest

In the spring of 1996 the New York University physicist Alan Sokal published a deliberately meaningless article in Social Text, a respected journal of cultural studies, and then immediately announced that it was a hoax. The paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” argued — in dense, fashionable prose studded with real citations to leading theorists — that physical reality is a social and linguistic construct and that quantum gravity confirms postmodern epistemology. It was nonsense by design. Sokal, a working physicist, had written something he knew to be false and incoherent to test whether a journal would print it so long as it sounded impressive and flattered the editors’ assumptions.

It would. “Transgressing the Boundaries” appeared in Social Text‘s Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue, an issue assembled partly to rebut critics of postmodern science studies. On the same day, in the May 1996 issue of the magazine Lingua Franca, Sokal published “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” revealing that the article was a parody and quoting his own absurdities back at the field. The journal had not sent the piece to any physicist, and at the time Social Text did not practise formal peer review. The deception was not subtle and was never meant to last; the point was made the moment both pieces were in print.

The case is a hoax of a particular kind. Sokal forged no object and stole no money; what he counterfeited was scholarly authority itself, demonstrating that a credentialed-sounding argument could pass without anyone competent checking whether its physics meant anything. He stated his aim plainly: to see whether a leading journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” The answer, in this instance, was yes.

The affair detonated into one of the defining intellectual controversies of the 1990s “science wars.” Social Text‘s editors, including Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, protested that they had been deceived in bad faith and that they had read the piece charitably as an earnest scientist’s reach toward their field. Sokal’s defenders countered that the very willingness to publish work they had not understood, in a field that claimed authority over science, was exactly the problem. He expanded the argument in a 1997 book with the physicist Jean Bricmont, published as Impostures intellectuelles and in English as Fashionable Nonsense, and returned to it in 2008 in Beyond the Hoax.