Heh...
Shades of Physicist Alan Sokal's
groundbreaking paper: “
Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” published in peer-reviewed Journal Social Text.
A deep-sounding paper but totally bunkum.
Sokal's website goes into some delicious detail on the thoughts that went into it and the reactions that followed when he announced that it was all a joke.
Well, it has happened again. From Slate, meet
British sociologist Harry Collins:
The Amateur's Revenge
Posing as a physicist—and getting away with it.
W.H. Auden once remarked, "When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes." Scientists often do have an aristocratic air. After all, they know things—important things, nature's secrets—that the rest of us could never understand ourselves. Or could we?
In a recent experiment of his design, British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of judges who are themselves gravitational-wave researchers. The judges couldn't tell the impostor from one of their own. Collins argues that he is therefore as qualified as anyone to discuss this field, even though he can't conduct experiments in it.
Collins' feat startled the scientific community. The journal Nature predicted that the experiment would have a broad impact, writing that Collins could help settle the "science wars of the 1990s," "when sociologists launched what scientists saw as attacks on the very nature of science, and scientists responded in kind," accusing the sociologists of misunderstanding science. More generally, it could affect "the argument about whether an outsider, such as an anthropologist, can properly understand another group, such as a remote rural community." With this comment, Nature seemed to be saying that if a sociologist can understand physics, then anyone can understand anything.
The Slate article goes on to mention Sokal and has some nice quotes.
Fun stuff!
ANd a big tip 'o the hat to
The Braden Files
Posted by DaveH at October 14, 2006 10:21 PM