8 Bonkers Hoaxes That Actually Fooled People

4. The Sokal Hoax

If you thought a cat with a degree was bad, get a load of the Sokal Hoax.

When an academic paper with the title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was published in the Social Text journal in 1996, nothing seemed to be amiss. It seemed like a perfectly normal, if slightly dense and verbose, academic article in which the author uses lots of unnecessarily long words and includes more footnotes that actual text.

This is apart from the fact that the paper was actually intentionally gibberish.

Much like in the case of Zoe D. Katze, PhD., it was submitted by physics professor Alan Sokal to make the point that, not only will some journals publish any old rubbish, but also that they don't appear to understand a lot of the things they print. Underneath all of the technical waffling, the main thrust of the paper was that gravity was a capitalist hoax "that would be made irrelevant by the socialist/feminist/relativist theory of 'quantum gravity."

Here's an excerpt to give you an idea:

"Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step further, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized."

You can't really blame them for taking his word for it.