THE SOKAL HOAX.

THE SOKAL HOAX. Kids, the reference in the Economist article to a “Sokal moment” refers to a famous hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor. This wikipedia article describes the hoax. In 1996 Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The hoax was directed against a point of view that “questioned the validity of scientific objectivity”. The paper proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The article was accepted, and on the date of its publication, Sokal published an article in another journal, proclaiming “that the article was a hoax, identifying it as ‘a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense…structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics'”.