http://www.metafilter.com/tags/AlanSokal Posts tagged with 'AlanSokal' at MetaFilter. Tue, 05 Nov 2002 07:23:51 -0800 Tue, 05 Nov 2002 07:23:51 -0800 en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 http://www.metafilter.com/21378/ Remember the Sokal Hoax? In the mid 1990s, NYU professor <a href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/">Alan Sokal</a> got a deliberately ridiculous <a href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html">paper </a> in the po-mo journal <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_text/"><i>Social Text</i></a>, which would have embarrassed the editors if the concept of shame weren't merely a social construct. Now it seems that turnabout is fair play. In this week's <a href="http://www.chronicle.com"><i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i></a>, there's a fascinating article about two brothers -- they apparently got their physics PhDs by spouting nonsense, and even got their tripe published in peer-reviewed journals. (The article itself requires a subscription, but <a href="http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html">here</a> is an account by one of the players in the drama. Even though every scientific field has bad journals and these papers are in French, which consigned them to less well-known journals, it's still a major embarrassment for physics. tag:metafilter.com,2002:site.21378 Tue, 05 Nov 2002 07:23:51 -0800 AlanSokal badphysics BadScience SokalHoax ptermit