FROM JAMES BONE   
IN NEW YORK 

A NEW YORK University physicist, appalled by trendy left-wing scholarship, has hoaxed a leading academic journal into publishing a spoof full of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook. 

The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", appeared this month in Social Text, a journal whose contributors helped to invent the growing field of cultural studies. 

The journal's editors and readers might never have known they had been hoodwinked had Alan  Sokal, the author, not revealed his deception in Lingua Franca, a magazine widely read by academics. 

"While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious," Professor  Sokal wrote. "What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities." 

The hoax provides rare humour in the bitterly serious culture wars raging among American academics. Science's traditional quest for the absolute has come under attack from left-wing intellectuals seeking to deconstruct scientific truths. 

Professor Sokal, 41, describes himself as a "leftist and a feminist". But he became alarmed about the critique of science that prevailed in many cultural studies departments. 

The turning point came when he read Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrel with Science, by Norman Levitt and Paul Gross, which exposes the modish thinking of many academics. 

Rather than write a detailed refutation, Professor Sokal set out to parody the cultural studies movement by assembling an article from the silliest quotes about science that he could find. The piece contained such pearls as: " ... 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-centred, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point". 

But Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist and director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the City University of New York who co-founded the journal, called Professor Sokal ill-read and half-educated. "He says we're epistemic relativists," he howled in The New York Times. "We're not. He got it wrong."