A year ago, as last June’s Physics World was going to press, our North American correspondent contacted us with a late-breaking story about Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University who had just published a deliberately meaningless paper in a “critical studies” journal called Social Text. The story sounded amusing but not, in my opinion, important enough to drop another story, and certainly not of such significance still to be of interest a month later. A year later, the “Sokal Hoax” has become a mini-industry – a by-word for the increasing friction at the interface between the natural and social sciences – and, like the editors of Social Text, I have to confess that I made a mistake.
The fact that Sokal’s paper was published does not in itself prove anything profound. However, it did drag into the open an on-going squabble between a group of scientists, many of them physicists, and various sociologists of science. Many scientists feel uneasy about various ideas from sociology, notably the suggestion that the laws of nature as we know them are “social constructs” – essentially laws that scientists have agreed between themselves – and do not have any fundamental significance. “Relativism” is another name for this school of thought.
Writing in defence of Sokal in the New York Review of Books, Steven Weinberg contrasted the laws of physics with the laws of baseball to counter the relativists. Both sets of laws are “real”, he said, but real in different ways: the laws of baseball are clearly a social construct whereas the laws of physics correspond to an objectivity reality. As Weinberg put it: “if we ever discover intelligent creatures on some distant planet and translate their scientific works, we will find that we and they have discovered the same laws.”
It is, however, difficult to deny that social factors play a part in the conduct and progress of physics. Although the laws of physics and the other empirical sciences may be immune to social constructs – indeed some of them must be, otherwise the phrase fundamental research becomes an oxymoron – physicists and scientists are certainly not. The name and affiliation of an author (and gender too, if the results of a recent study in Sweden apply more widely) play some small role in deciding what papers are accepted, read and eventually written about in magazines like this one.
There are also tensions when non-empirical “boundary conditions” such as the scientific method, Popper’s theory of falsification and the practice of peer review are applied to research and knowledge. These ideas have served science well but are not without fault. The recent brouhaha about the “axis of the universe” highlights what appears to be a lapse in the peer-review process at a leading physics journal. Moreover, there is something abstract about the way in which new laws enter the canon of physics. And on-going disputes, such as the controversy over the age of the universe, show that complex problems and partial data can lead to vigorous differences of opinion between camps of “real” scientists.
In years to come the many different ages of the universe that are on offer today will seem as unimportant to physicists as the early erratic results of Michelson, Morley and Millikan seem now. But the convergence of debate and disagreement into knowledge is surely a process that is worth investigating – and one that most physicists do not have the time or the skills to disentangle. It is therefore inevitable that other scholars will inhabit this territory.
Scientists might not like everything that this new breed has to say – especially if some sociologists continue to insist that the objective reality that is essential to physics does not exist – but it is surely worth talking to them and, hopefully, listening as well.
Many articles on the Sokal Hoax are available at http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal.
