By now it is well known that New York University physicist Alan Sokal managed to get a hoax paper published in the Duke University journal of cultural criticism Social Text. I quote from the paper at some length below, to make it quite clear Sokal made assertions which will strike the rational person as nonsense, and should have been noticed by a thoughtful high school graduate. Emphasis on the most egregious points is mine, not Sokal's.
It is important to read this, because the editors of Social Text have defended their action by claiming they do, indeed believe there is a scientific external reality, only our interpretation is "socially constructed", i.e. science is made up of man-made rules like a ball game. Of course the fashionable postmodern, critical editors believe in a real world in some sense, otherwise they could not drive cars or turn on TV. But they fell for the hoax because it flattered their ideology, their idea that all knowledge is merely an arbitrary agreement among powerful groups, mostly dead, white males. The ideology insists "knowledge" is constructed so that feminists, Blacks, native peoples, and other marginalized groups have "science" every bit as "valid" as modern science. In other words, creationism, chiropractic, ayurveda and other new age nonsense may be as valid as physics.
Cultural criticism began with the social sciences and history arguing these fields are mere opinion. Only when similar claims were made about physics and chemistry did scientists pay attention. Yet, to scholars not totally bereft of sense and besotted by the Newage, it is clear there are facts and accurate interpretations, valid and nonsense generalisations in economics, sociology, and history every bit as compelling as in the hard sciences.
From: Alan Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" Social Text 46/47, vol 14, no 1 and 2, Spr/Sum 1996, pp. 217-252 (footnotes omitted).
pp 217-218
But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian- Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the facade of "objectivity". It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality," no less than social "reality," is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge," far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross's discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles's exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.
p. 222
The key point is that this invariance group "acts transitively": this means that any space-time point, if it exists at all, can be transformed into any other. In this way the infinite-dimensional invariance group erodes the distinction between observer and observed; the pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone.
"Crystals are bound to have magical psychic powers, how else could they be used to make such pretty jewelry."
Various skeptics have written, phoned, or e-mailed your editor about last month's opinion from Esmeralda. They claim her quote was not clear, in that we do not know whether the primitive humans ate the dinosaurs, or the dinosaurs ate the primitive humans. I would like to set the issue straight, her statement is perfectly confused and totally ambiguous. Thank you.
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