Part 6/11:
To deepen this examination, one might recall the notorious academic prank pulled by physicist Alan Sokal in the 1990s. Sokal humorously crafted an article filled with nonsensical jargon—“Transgressing the Boundary: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”—before successfully publishing it in a leading cultural studies journal, Social Text. His intent was to expose the increasingly shaky intellectual ground in postmodern discourse: how well-credentialed individuals, under the influence of prevailing ideologies, sometimes advance dubious arguments absent of rigorous scrutiny.