October 28th, 2002
Marxism and Quantum Physics
I can’t believe I haven’t head about this, but apparently, in 1996, Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, wrote an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity“, in which he parodied cultural studies, postmodernism, and so on, writing a paper full of gibberish using dozens of Marxist, Socialist and other “Post-Modern” writers. The hillarious thing is that he actually got the paper published in a peer-review journal, “Social Text” — which as you might imagine, is full of such postmodern crap.
What’s really hilarious is that the paper is full of complete gibberish, yet makes fun of all the “post-modern” crap that has been popularized in academia, and shows how “a liberatory postmodern science” leads to blatant nonsense when subjectivism is applied to scientific knowledge.