The 1996 paper is now legendary in academic circles. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, penned by the mathematician Alan Sokal, was published in a cultural-studies journal. It claimed that physical reality was a social and linguistic construct.
It was a floridly written spoof: a jargon-heavy, plausible-sounding parody designed to pander to the biases of lazy reviewers and expose flaws in the academic enterprise. The bogus paper, targeting preening postmodernist intellectuals pontificating on scientific matters, confirmed the suspicions of Sokal — now at University College London — that the canon of human knowledge was vulnerable to rogue infiltration.
The hoax seems comically quaint today compared with the fraud crisis plaguing science journals. This week, the publisher Wiley announced it would close 19 journals, some of which had been linked to large-scale research fraud. In the past two years, according to reports, it has retracted more than 11,000 papers. Wiley and other publishers, such as Springer Nature, are battling an epidemic of fakery.