The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?

The hoax perpetrated by New York University theorical physicist Alan Sokal in 1996 on the editors of the journal Social Text quickly became widely known and hotly debated. (See PHYSICS TODAY January 1997, page 61, and March 1997, page 73.) “Transgressing the Boundaries—Toward a Transformative Her-meneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was the title of the parody he slipped past the unsuspecting editors. (See figure 1.)