3 quarks 4 master sokal

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Paul M. wonders:

>Wish I could think of a modern physics hoax comparable to Piltdown
>to round out my meditations. The fact I can't may be further indicative
>of something.

Maybe it's indicative of the whole enterprise being a hoax?  They aren't even close 
to being sure of the Hubble constant, for gosh sakes!  Every 
fundamental--finding--of contemporary physics is marked like those old maps: 
here there be dragons.  I realize that I am fuzzying up the distinction between 
unknowability and deliberate fraud or hoaxing.  But the core of my beef is that the 
scientific community sets itself  up as judge and jury on the whole question.  And if 
a student of the social construction of science ventures to say that, well, maybe 
what you guys do isn't so far from what poets and novelists do--create worlds, 
which may or may not resemble this one (i.e., the one that's all that the case is, 
which I always took to mean there's no transcendence, just matter; but remember 
Wittgenstein repudiated the entire TRACTATUS a few decades later), then they 
puff up and say humph humph: there is a world out there and the things we say 
about it are true.  A-and we're back to where we started! They are the mean parents 
of our culture, saying do what I say because I say so.

Superstring theory?  Tachyons? Quarks (lifted, by the way, from a novel)?

john m