ABSTRACT
Late one afternoon in the spring of 1996, I heard part of a radio interview with a physicist named Alan Sokal. It was about something he had just done. He explained that he had been inspired to do it by reading Higher Superstition, a book by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (1994) that also inspired Robert Bork (1996). Several years earlier, a colleague had tried to persuade me to read this book by shoving it under my nose open to a page on which an opaque remark by Jacques Derrida is alleged by the authors to reveal his “eagerness to claim familiarity with deep scientific matters.” The remark begins, “The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center.” My colleague expected me to find this ridiculous but I explained that I could not find it anything because I had no idea what it means. The authors talked as if they did but they gave me no reason to believe them.3
Later, after some investigation, I concluded that not only did they not know what Derrida meant, they probably did not care. They were engaged in an attempt at humiliation, not scholarship.
