Weinberg, Steven. "Sokal's Hoax." THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. 8 August 1996. Volume XLIII, Number 13, pp. 11-15.

BIOGRAPHIC AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC
Steven Weinberg holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of texas at Austin. For his work on the theory of particles and fields he received theNobel Prize in Physics and the National Medal of Science. His most recent book for a general audience is Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Lawes of Nature. (from the contents page of NYRofB)

SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT
We summarize Weinberg and comment on his significance and relationship to other work in a Table Talk.

Weinberg gives a useful scorecard on the specific scientific howlers incorporated into the hoax article by Sokal. See the Weinberg article for the specifics, which are of only marginal interest to THE PROGRAMME as such.

Courtesy of the Deleuze/Guattari discussion list and Sokal himself, we obtained the full text of Alan Sokal's article, Transgressing the Boundaries--Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. The D&G discussion list had a flurry of commentary, signifiying little in the long run, except that Sokal's article, whatever its merits, hit an exposed nerve in the worlds of ideas about culture and science.

Sokal's page carries numerous comments on the hoax, or parody, as he calls it.

19 July 1996
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