Reminds me of when Alan Sokal wrote a paper full of buzzwords and co-opted scientific language and name-dropping then submitted it to a prestigious cultural studies journal [1]. Thesis: quantum gravity is merely a social and linguistic construct.
Accepted.
The humanities are still trying to recover from that one.
> The humanities are still trying to recover from that one.
In much the same way that 'science' is still recovering from prestigious journals publishing results that mysteriously fail to replicate[1] and software engineering is still recovering from the fact that there are 85 randomly generated papers published by the IEEE[2], yes.
But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know any better.
"But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know any better."
It's not unlike what we have in France with the Bogdanov brothers [1]. They are pretty much scientific impostors but they are still quite popular and sell a lot of unintelligible books.
I don't blame people for being duped. But rather the medias and journalists that put them in the spotlight instead of competent and honest scientists.
The second paper references the Sokal Affair, as a matter of fact - the authors of the paper are from the (obviously fake) "Sokal Institute of Technology, Pune". :)
In fact, it references verbatim dialogues from "My Cousin Vinny", "Sholay" (a superhit Bollywood film), the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the author's wife and her movie-review website and whole lot of other nonsense. :(
Accepted.
The humanities are still trying to recover from that one.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair