In 1996 Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, published an article in Social
Text, a highly respectable American academic journal for cultural studies,
using technical terminology and liberal references to scientists such as
Heisenberg and Bohr, and linguistic theorists such as Derrida and Irigaray.
He advanced the notion that 'post-modern' science had abolished the
concept of physical reality. Once it was published, he announced that it was
a hoax. In doing so, and in the later publication, Intellectual Impostures, with
Jean Bricmont, he showed how many fashionable post-modern theorists
of language, literature, sociology, and psychology had adopted technical
language from science to explain their theories without understanding this
terminology, and thus much of what they had written was, in fact, utterly
meaningless. It was the latest controversy in what has become known as the
war between 'the two cultures'.