The
full title of this
landmark paper is: "
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". The
hoax was revealed (simultaneously with the
publication) in
Alan Sokal's "
A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies".
In Transgressing, Sokal attacks the view that "can be summarized briefly as follows":
that there exists an external world, whose
properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are
encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge
of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called)
scientific method.
Sokal claims, rather, that
It has thus become
increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct;
that scientific ``knowledge'', far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of
the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and
consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged
epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized
communities.
Note, in particular, the claim that "
physical reality is ... a [social construct]". In later works, Sokal invites anyone who believes this to step out of his apartment window (he lives on the 22nd floor).
So where do these incredible claims come from? Sokal claims to find them in existing post-modernist critique:
These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural
fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in
Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the
gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.
In fact, Harding's "difference of emphasis" is huge; the editors of
Social Text, despite being experts in Harding (if not in quantum gravity), apparently failed to comment.
The paper's thesis, however, is (if possible) even more startling: that quantum gravity (which physicists have so far been unable to develop) requires such "new thinking" to be developed! Of course, it is hard to imagine any logical argumentation that will lead to this position; it certainly doesn't appear in the paper.
Instead, the mathematically educated reader is treated to a huge variety of nonsense (including the relationship of i in the complex plane to the male phallic organ; this is not Sokal's invention). Any B.Sc. in physics or mathematics should have been able to identify nonsense such as appears in the paper: For example, footnote 60 contains this gem:
For a gentle introduction to set theory, see Bourbaki (1970).
While the Bourbaki
books may be a marvel of comprehensiveness and concisesness,
nobody learns
anything from them.
The list goes on and on. The word "linearity" is (of course) abused; chaos theory relates to nonlinear systems, but this "nonlinearity" has nothing to do with nonlinear thinking. Even strict jargon terms from set theory can be reinterpreted literally, and "valid" conclusions established. Footnote 105 has this:
liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice.
A là Sokal, "
choice" here refers to the term used in the
U.S.A. in the debate about
abortion. Of course,
Paul Cohen can be misapplied here, to add to the nonsense:
But this framework is grossly insufficient for a liberatory mathematics, as was proven long ago by Cohen (1966)
What Cohen really showed was that the axiom of choice is independent of
ZF; this has nothing to do with, well, almost anything, and certainly nothing to do with any liberal or socialist
political agenda.
Especially impressive are the copious footnotes, which contain even more nonsense than the text.
Highly recommended!