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Future historians will marvel at the significance of the so-called Sokal hoax of 1996, whose implications for the science studies disciplines continue to reverberate through academic life around the world. Alan Sokal is nowadays credited with having revealed the 'impostures' of French intellectuals - and their American admirers - who claimed to see a vindication of postmodernism in post-classical physics and mathematics. That even the French have taken this verdict to heart is reflected in the pocketbook compiled by Sophie Roux, herself a respected historian of early modern science.
As for Sokal's own latest offering, the sheer materiality of Beyond the Hoax speaks volumes. It is an inexpensive hardback coffee table book but without the artful fonts and graphics one normally expects of such books. Indeed, the book is merely a collection of Sokal's post-hoax essays presented in what might be mistaken for camera-ready copy. Indicative of Oxford University Press's belief in the hoax's intrinsic significance is that it would publish such a book with low production values.
So what exactly is the Sokal hoax's significance? In 1996 Sokal, an obscure physicist at New York University, published an article in Social Text, then the leading cultural-studies journal in the United States, entitled 'Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. Sokal had it all planned. He had mastered the jargon and genuflected to all the right authorities, and even declared (genuine) leftist credentials as a former maths instructor to the Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. But he also planted errors that only specialists in the relevant branches of physics and mathematics would easily spot. The New York Times, somehow primed of the hoax's appearance, featured it as a front-page story shortly after publication.
A predictable level of denial, backpedalling...