In my last post, we looked at how postmodernism crashes into the hard reality of physics and engineering. But you might wonder, do postmodernists really believe science is just a cultural myth, or is that a caricature? In 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokal decided to find out by playing a legendary prank on the academic world.

Frustrated by postmodern professors claiming that scientific facts are just political power plays, Sokal wrote a completely nonsensical paper filled with dense, fancy-sounding academic jargon. The paper, named Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, argued that quantum gravity was not a physical reality, but rather a "social and linguistic construct". He submitted it to Social Text, a leading, prestigious postmodern journal. The editors loved it. They thought it was a brilliant piece of scholarship and proudly published it. Three weeks after it hit the presses, Sokal revealed the hoax, exposing the fact that an entire sector of academia couldn't tell the difference between real science and a deliberate parody.

The hoax proved that when you throw out the concept of objective truth, you don't become more enlightened or open-minded. You just lose the ability to spot nonsense.

Once again, let's not use postmodern thinking when engaging with the world around us. It's a dead end. Don't do postmodernism.