What is the scientific world coming to? Is the educated community becoming a “secular priesthood”(Sokal Transgressing) of authorities maintaining and controlling the paths of the scientific world? Who or what determines where science goes: war, society, mass media? Alan Sokal, a physicist teacher from NYU, tried an experiment to show how some very smart people do some incredibly sloppy thinking. Writing an essay suggesting a link in quantum mechanics and postmodernism, Sokal was able to cause a heated debate among institutions of cultural studies that is still ongoing. The document entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was published in the spring of 1996. Being a hoax, he wanted to see if: "a leading North American journal of cultural studies . . . would publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions"(Kimball). He believed that the editors would have known right from the beginning that his paper was a swindle. He tells how he did this.Hickey 2Throughout the article, I employ scientific and mathematical concepts in ways that few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously. For example, I suggest that the "morphogenetic field'' -- a bizarre New Age idea due to Rupert Sheldrake -- constitutes a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. This connection is pure invention; even Sheldrake makes no such claim. I assert that Lacan's psychoanalytic speculations have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field theory. Even nonscientist readers might well wonder what in heavens' name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis; certainly my article gives no reasoned argument to support such a link.In sum, I intentionally wrote the article so that any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize that it is a ...
