Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American professor Alan Sokal.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
Alan David Sokal is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's Social Text. He also co-authored a paper criticizing the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.
Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor).
A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.
Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?
And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.