(Also your Saturday night humour article)

Way back in 1996 a physics professor at New York University and University College London, Alan Sokal, submitted an article to an academic journal of cultural studies called Social Text. It was an experiment, a demonstrative scholarly hoax, to test the intellectual rigor of a journal that held itself out as “a leading North American journal of cultural studies”. Sokal wanted to see if they’d publish an article “liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”

They did, and it became known as the Sokal Affair.

How nonsensical was the article? It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct.

When Sokal revealed the hoax in May 1996, after the article was published, there was lots of huffing and puffing from the Liberal Arts community about fraud but most of the world just laughed at them.

Unfortunately that laughter didn’t translate into totally destroying this post-modernist insanity, as was revealed just the other day:

A professor of physics and gender studies who has argued that “white empiricism” undermines Einstein’s theory of general relativity now sits on a top physics advisory panel within the Department of Energy….Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire who has suggested that string theory “failed to succeed” because the field has too many white men, was appointed to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) under the Biden administration in 2024. The panel advises the Energy Department on research and funding priorities for particle physics, giving it significant say over which projects receive federal support.

FFS! String theory, cool as it is (and a subject of humor in the American comedy series, The Big Bang, whose main character, Sheldon, specialises in it), has failed because countless experiments have failed to prove it. Admittedly the string theorists, in true post-modernist style, have simply moved the goalposts of the theory after each failure, so perhaps Ms. Prescod-Weinstein isn’t so alone after all. Mr Sokal is also rather generous on this specific matter:

String theory has failed to succeed in expected ways because the problems being studied are extraordinarily difficult.

But despite being called a Physicist and a Cosmologist the fact is that this woman only gets published in things like Signs, a gender studies journal published by the University of Chicago, where she gets to write about things like Einstein’s theory of General Relativity as follows:

[The theory is based in the] “idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other….Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent … Given that Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle … have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression, we can dispense with any suggestion that the low number of Black women in science indicates any lack of validity on their part as observers.

In other words, if a black woman knows nothing at all about relativity or even high-school level physics, her opinions about it are just as important as those of an actual specialist in Relativity Theory.

AYFKM? This is her contribution to science? And for this Biden (actually the Far Left staff of President Ambulatory Root Vegetable) appointed her to a position advising on high energy physics for the Department of Energy.

I’d like to see put her under oath and forced to answer actual scientific questions about Relativity Theory, String Theory and such because I don’t think she could answer even the most basic ones.

Fire them all.

Better yet, destroy outfits like the Department of Energy, another relic of the Jimmy Carter era that has proved to be as useless as his Department of Education in that it hasn’t done anything better than what previous Federal agencies like the Atomic Energy Authority did.