Re: [asa] important physics result announced today (fwd)

This is a cracking article. Sokal simply used sociological jargon of social scientists to make them look silly. He wrote the paper got it peer reviewed and then when it was published said it was a joke.

It is a wonderful gag or hoax and shows just how pretentious some of the gobbledygook-toting socialscientist academics are.

He was not popular

But at the time I thought it wonderful.

You get much the same from a lot of Postmodernism which makes me either laugh or cry.

Michael

----- Original Message -----
  From: Kirk Bertsche
  To: gordon brown
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 4:31 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] important physics result announced today (fwd)

  I sent this link to some co-workers yesterday. One of them mentioned his favorite physics spoof, which fooled the editors of a social science journal:
  Alan D. Sokal, ``Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,'' Social Text #46/47 (spring/summer 1996): 217-252.
  http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

  Here's a discussion of the spoof by the author:
  http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/noretta.html

  Kirk

  On Apr 1, 2009, at 10:01 AM, gordon brown wrote:

    I don't have time to read this right now, but maybe some physicist can tell us what it is all about. My quick glance at it made it appear that it was in the context of string theory and that it said that some dimensionless constant pi might vary with time and help to explain the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Maybe ten seconds of skimming isn't enough for me to have given the correct description.

    Gordon Brown (ASA member)

    ---------- Forwarded message ----------

    http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.5321

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Received on Thu Apr 2 13:47:06 2009