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during the year they measured, the result they found over and over was that
the earth seemed to be standing still. Many proposals were made to explain
this result. But as far as I know, no one ever proposed that the earth was,
in fact, standing still (at the center of the universe?).
Now imagine that the Michaelson-Morley experiment had been done
before Copernicus. Everyone would have said, why clid you waste your
time? We all know that the earth stands still at the center of the universe.
But at the end of the ninteenth century that was the one thing no one was
willing to say. Why not? Because the whole context had changed.
Scientists shared a different point of view.
Of course scientists are influenced by what other people believe and by
their times. The underlying meaning of a scientific theory can change quite
radically from one century to another. When people say that science is not
objective but subjective, they do not appreciate that very few scientists
worry about underlying meaning in the first place, and when they do so,
they generally don't do it very well. This is not their daily concern. Science
is a craft in which internal structures are built-as the structure of a cathe–
dral. It is astonishing that between the nineteenth and twentieth century
that cathedral has been picked up and moved from one place to another. It
sits on other foundations, there is another view of nature; but the internal
structural relations are essentially the arne. And it is these internal struc–
tural relations that are the real content of science, and they remain
essentially invariant from Newton to Einstein to the quantum theory and
no doubt will remain the same in theories that will emerge in the future.
Let's talk a bit now about Alan Sokal, who submitted a paper to
Social
Text
called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Transformative Hermeneutics
of Quantum Gravity." If the title doesn't make you laugh, what follows
surely will.
Mter
the eclitors of this magazine published it, they claimed
they were deceived. Stanley Fish wrote that Sokal was undermining the
trust of one person in another. Perhaps he did to a certain extent. But what
is going on if the editors of a magazine can't tell the difference between
something that is patently a hoax and something that is real? If someone
sends me a scientific paper in a field wi th which I am familiar, even if I
don't understand everything that is written I would hope to be able to
determine whether or not it was a hoax. If nothing follows from anything
else, I would send it back and ask for clarification. In an electronic posting
on the internet Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, the editors, were furi–
ous, and stated:
Why does science matter so much to us? Because its power is a civil
religion, has a social poli tical authori
ty
that affects our daily lives, and
the powerless condition of the natural world more than does any
