A: We’ve all had the experience of trying to bluff our way through a college paper. You just pick a vague, complicated topic, back it up with examples that seem vaguely relevant; mix in a slice of baloney here, a splash of hogwash there; and most importantly, use big words!

Of course, none of this is any guarantee your paper will slip past your professor’s BS-detector, but hey, there’s always the prospect of getting it published in a distinguished academic journal, right? After all, how hard can that be? Apparently, not very – as NYU physics professor Alan Sokal was able to show in 1996 when his article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Physics” was published in the respected cultural studies journal Social Text.

Sokal actually submitted the article as a hoax to prove that academic journals will publish any paper that uses big words – and evidently he was right. To the extent that Sokal’s article is readable, it makes a grandly silly argument about the political implications of quantum gravity. Among other nonsensical assertions, the article claims that physical reality doesn’t exist, that the laws of physics are social constructs, and that feminism has implications for mathematical set theory.

After Sokal revealed his hoax in Lingua Franca, many academic journals beefed up their peer review process – an unfortunate development for those academics in the BS-manufacturing business.