In reply to Stephen Blacks writing [snip] >Note: I'm not talking about legitimately difficult exposition such as, >for example, in modern mathematics. Mere mortals cannot understand >such writing, not because it lacks meaning, but because it deals with >genuinely difficult matters which only the seriously smart can >understand. This, alas, is not the case with postmodernist babble.
Bill Scott wrote on 15 January 2007: >The problem is one for math and physics also, as evidenced by the >Bogdanov affair. >See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair Okay, Bill, but I think the differences are much greater than the similarities. For starters, the kind of stuff Stephen is writing about has pervaded almost all areas of the humanities in recent decades and believe me, for someone not in the field Ive skimmed a fair amount of the stuff, of which abstracts of articles suffice to convey the flavour Stephen illustrates above. You wont find such problems as thrown up by the Bogdanov affair in any but the most abstruse areas of theoretical physics. Secondly, unlike the Sokal article, which would almost certainly have remained just another of many thousands of like-sounding articles in humanities journals if Sokal hadnt owned up to its being a hoax, the Bogdanov articles were quickly queried by many professional physicists as being either largely nonsense or a hoax. Nothing remotely comparable happened in the case of the Sokal article. Unlike the postmodern jargon that permeates almost all areas of the humanities, no problem remotely comparable to the Bodanov situation has occurred in the scores of areas of physics which dont lend themselves to such highly abstruse mathematics and theoretical speculations as that relating to the subject matter of the articles in question. Background: The two brothers published a total of six papers in physics and mathematics journals, including Annals of Physics and Classical and Quantum Gravity, which are both reviewed by referees. After reading the abstracts of both theses, German physicist Max Niedermaier concluded that the papers were pseudoscientific, consisting of dense technical jargon written to sound scientific without having real content On 22 October 2002, Niedermaier wrote an email to this effect which was then widely distributed. An eventual recipient, the American mathematical physicist John Baez, created a discussion thread on the Usenet newsgroup sci.physics.research titled "Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax?" which quickly grew to hundreds of posts in length . Following Niedermaier, the majority of the participants in the Usenet discussion thread created by Baez also voiced the assumption that the work was a deliberate hoax, which the Bogdanov brothers have continued to deny. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair (Some information about the publication of the controversial article can be found on this same Wikipedia webpage.) Here is the view of the mathematical physicist John Baez: However, I assure you that the Bogdanoff's theses are gibberish to me - even though I work on topological quantum field theory, and know the meaning of almost all the buzzwords they use. Their journal articles make the problem even clearer. You can easily get ahold of these, because they are appended to the PDF files containing their theses. Some parts almost seem to make sense, but the more carefully I read them, the less sense they make... and eventually I either start laughing or get a headache. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanoff/ See Baez/Igor Bogdanov exchanges: http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/spr/2002-11/msg0045739.html N.B. To get some idea just how abstruse the mathematics gets when you get into these regions, try these: Drinfeld type quantum groups One common structure, which is called a "quantum group", after the work of Vladimir Drinfel'd, Nicolai Reshetikhin, Michio Jimbo, and others, is a deformation of the universal enveloping algebra of a semisimple Lie algebra or, more generally, a Kac-Moody algebra. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_group Quasitriangular Hopf algebra http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?sub=8606&id=327365069 Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org/ --------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:15:30 -0500 Author: "William Scott" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Education jargon Body: Stephen Black writes: > Stephen Black writes: > > "If there's one thing that Alan Sokal's brilliant "Transgressing" hoax > on > the journal _Social Text_ tells us, it's that the people who claim to > understand such nonsense really don't. It's not even clear that the > people who _write_ the stuff understand it. Postmodernists seem to have > academic defecation disorder (ADD). It's writing to impress, not to > communicate. information. > > So who cares what the author may or may not have been trying to say. If > it can't be understood without the need for someone else explain it to > us, let's just flush it down the toilet. > > Note: I'm not talking about legitimately difficult exposition such as, > for example, in modern mathematics. Mere mortals cannot understand such > writing, not because it lacks meaning, but because it deals with > genuinely difficult matters which only the seriously smart can > understand. This, alas, is not the case with postmodernist babble." > -------------------------------------------------------------- > > The problem is one for math and physics also, as evidenced by the > Bogdanov affair. > See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair > > Bill Scott --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
