A physicist once invited anyone who believed the laws of physics were merely social conventions to test that theory by stepping out of his apartment window, which was on the 21st floor. This episode explores the mid-1990s moment when NYU and University College London physicist Alan Sokal deliberately wrote a paper of pure jargon-laden nonsense and submitted it to the cultural studies journal Social Text to see whether it would be published.

We break down how he built his linguistic Trojan horse, from claiming physical reality is a linguistic construct to endorsing Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field as quantum gravity, why the journal published it in a special science wars issue without outside peer review, and the confession he dropped three weeks later in Lingua Franca. The conversation covers his stated left-wing motives, the furious response from Social Text, Jacques Derrida’s counterattack in Le Monde, and why a nearly identical hoax by William M. Epstein in 1990 drew almost no attention.

• What scientific realism means and why humanities scholars were challenging the authority of science
• The title Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
• How Sokal refused to change a single word and the editors deferred to his credentials
• Stephen Hilgartner’s confirmatory bias explanation for why one hoax went global and another vanished
• Rob Willer’s 2009 experiment on prestige and the 2021 retracted paper credited to Sage Owens and Kal Avers Lynn III