Robert Siegel talks with Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, about his parody of practitioners of "science studies." He tells how he deliberately wrote an article questioning the validity of measuring physical "reality" using nonsensical phrases, and submitted it to a well-respected academic journal. The editors published it as a serious treatise, not realizing it was written as a joke. (Sokal's article, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," appeared in the May/June 1996 issue of Lingua Franca.
Copyright 1996 NPR