玛拉-贝勒（Mara Baruch）是世界上重要的量子力学史学家，对于“索卡尔事件”，她认为，指责后现代哲学家从量子物理学中得出无意义的结论并不完全公平，因为许多这样的结论是由一些领先的量子物理学家自己提出的，比如玻尔或海森堡在涉足哲学时得出的。

对于“索卡尔事件”，贝勒问：

- 反对后现代主义关于科学的文化研究的人们，从索卡尔事件中自信地得出结论： “皇帝。。没穿衣服”。但是，那些赤裸裸的皇帝到底是谁？我们应该嘲笑谁？

法语有句谚语，“把狼关进羊圈（Faire entrer le loup dans la bergerie）”，提醒人们，当把羊圈起来的时候不要把狼也圈进来。人是否意识到，人最终是要吃羊的，难道真正的“狼”不会是自己吗？

索卡尔的骗局：我们在嘲笑谁？

- 玻尔、玻恩、海森堡和泡利的哲学宣告应该为后现代主义对科学的过度批判承担部分责任。

玛拉-贝勒（Mara Beller）

纽约大学理论物理学家索卡尔（Alan Sokal）在1996年对《社会文本》杂志的编辑们实施的骗局很快就广为人知，并引起了激烈的讨论（见《今日物理》1997年1月第61页和1997年3月第73页）， “跨越边界—迈向量子引力的变革性诠释学 ”，是他塞给毫无戒心的编辑们的模仿文章的标题。

索卡尔文章的许多读者将其描述为对当代学术界智力标准下降的巧妙揭露，以及对科学的文化研究中猖獗的后现代废话的精彩模仿。Sokal的论文有各种不同的说法，我们读到的是“一个搞笑的胡言乱语的汇编”， “对学术胡言乱语的模仿”，甚至是“对全部胡言乱语的变革性解释学”。许多科学家报告说，他们在阅读Sokal的文章时感到“非常有趣”和“非常好笑”。然而，我们到底是在嘲笑谁呢？

作为索卡尔讽刺的观点的例子，我们可以引用一些其他的陈述。请看以下对海森堡的不确定性和玻尔的互补性在政治领域的推断：

“’光由粒子组成’的论点和'光由波组成'的对立面相互争斗，直到它们在量子力学的综合中结合起来。......只是为什么不把它应用于论题自由主义（或资本主义）、对立面共产主义，并期待一个综合体，而不是对立面的完全和永久的胜利？这似乎有一些不一致的地方。但是，互补性的想法更深入。事实上，这个论题和对立面代表了两种心理动机和经济力量，它们本身都是合理的，但在它们的极端中是相互排斥的。 ......自由的纬度df和管制的纬度dr之间必须存在一种关系，其类型是df dr=p。...但 "政治常数 « p是什么？我必须把这个问题留给未来的人类事务的量子理论。”

在你对这种“荒谬”大笑之前，让我透露一下作者，马克斯·玻恩，受人尊敬的量子理论奠基人之一[3]。玻恩的话并非口无遮拦；他冷静地宣称， “[来自物理学的]认识论教训可能有助于加深对社会和政治关系的理解”。玻恩对从科学领域推论到政治领域的热情如此之高，以至于他专门写了一整本书来讨论这个问题，明确题为《物理学与政治学》。

科学与宗教

玻恩的话并不是一个例外。阅读沃尔夫冈-泡利（Wolfgang Pauli）的哲学出版物和他未发表的科学通信，人们甚至可能会更加困惑不解。

“……科学和宗教必须彼此有关系。(我不是指 "物理学中的宗教"，也不是指 "宗教中的物理学"，因为任何一种都肯定是片面的，而是指将两者放在一个整体中。) 我想尝试给新的现实观念在我脑海中带来的东西起个名字：符号的现实观念。......它包含了一些旧的上帝概念以及旧的物质概念（物理学的一个例子：原子。填充空间的主要品质已经丧失。如果它不是一个符号，它怎么可能是 "既是波又是粒子 "呢？） 符号在 "这边 "和 "那边 « 方面是对称的……符号就像一个对人施加影响的神。”

据作者本人说，索卡尔讽刺的一个更荒唐的例子涉及从量子物理学到雅克-拉康（Jacques Lacan）的精神分析思想的推论，“即使是非科学家的读者也可能会想，量子场理论与精神分析到底有什么关系”—索卡尔在Lingua Franca的文章中感叹道，他在文章中迅速揭开了他的骗局。尽管如此，保利、玻尔和乔丹的著作中广泛讨论了量子理论和心理学之间的“深刻”联系。乔丹探讨了量子物理学和弗洛伊德精神分析学，甚至是超心理学之间的“形式”相似性。泡利，严肃地说，从量子概念到无意识的想法，到荣格的原型，甚至到额外的感官知觉。

玻尔的以下话语是这些前辈们关于量子和心理领域之间的联系的更清醒的陈述之一：

“……这个领域[心理学]......是以相互关系为特征的，这种关系取决于我们意识的统一性，与行动量子的物理后果表现出惊人的相似性。我们在这里想到的是众所周知的情感和意志的特点，这些特点是很难用视觉化的图片来表示的。特别是，联想思维的有意识的向前流动和保持人格的统一性之间的明显对比，显示出......与物质粒子运动的波的描述之间的关系相类似，......和它们不可毁灭的个性。

很少注意到的错误

像解构主义者雅克-德里达（Jacques Derrida）一样，史蒂芬-温伯格（Steven Weinberg）在1996年《纽约书评》关于索卡尔骗局的文章中对其进行了攻击，玻尔因其写作的晦涩性而臭名昭著。然而，物理学家与德里达和玻尔的晦涩性有着根本不同的关系：对德里达的蔑视，对玻尔的敬畏。玻尔的晦涩被归结为，一次又一次的“深度和微妙”，凡人是无法理解的。

也许披露另一个编辑上的疏忽会证明我的观点。在约翰-惠勒和沃伊切赫-祖雷克编辑的一本广泛使用的量子理论论文汇编中，玻尔的转载文章的页数不符合顺序。这篇论文（玻尔对1935年著名的爱因斯坦-波多尔斯基-罗森对标准哥本哈根解释的批评的回应）被物理学家和科学哲学家在当代文献中广泛引用。然而，我从未听到有人抱怨说，这卷书中玻尔的文字有问题。这个错误，似乎很少有人注意到，尽管它出现在硬封面和软封面的版本中。

当物理学家未能在玻尔的著作找到意义，无论他们如何努力，他们指责自己，而不是玻尔（Einstein and Schrödinger were among the rare exceptions)。卡尔-冯-魏茨泽克（Carl von Weizsäcker）的证词是一个突出的例子，说明了玻尔的权威，几乎是压倒性的影响。与玻尔会面后，冯-魏茨泽克问自己，“玻尔是什么意思？我必须了解什么才能知道他的意思，为什么他是正确的？我在无尽的孤独的散步中折磨着自己”。请注意，冯-魏茨泽克没有问：“玻尔是对的吗？”或“在什么程度上，或在什么问题上，玻尔是对的吗？”或“在什么问题上玻尔是对的？”但是，很不可思议的是，他想知道必须假设什么，必须以什么方式来论证，以便使玻尔正确？

在玻尔、海森堡、泡利、玻恩和乔丹的著作中充斥着惊人的言论，与索卡尔所讽刺的那些言论几乎没有区别。而且，它们并不只是随意的、偶然的言论。玻尔打算把他的互补性哲学作为一个总体的认识论原则—运用于物理学、生物学、心理学、人类学，他期望互补性是一个替代失去的宗教。他认为，互补性应该在小学里教给孩子们。泡利认为，我们时代最重要的任务是阐述一个新的现实的量子概念，将科学和宗教统一起来。玻恩说，量子哲学将帮助人类应对二战后的政治现实。海森堡表示，希望量子物理学的成果“将对思想世界的更广泛领域产生影响，[就像]文艺复兴末期的变化改变了后续时代的文化生活。”

这些量子理论的设计者对其对文化领域的深远影响如此有信心，以至于他们在美国建立了一个“互补性研究所”的信件。这样一个研究所的目的，将由玻尔领导，将促进玻尔哲学。衰老的玻恩恳求玻尔不要离开他的这项事业。

后现代主义的胡言乱语

索卡尔的骗局被巧妙地设计出来了。从他文章开头引用的玻尔和海森堡的话逐渐滑向后现代主义关于科学和政治之间联系的胡言乱语，这太自然了。当像唐娜-威尔希尔这样的女权主义者，或者像斯坦利-阿罗诺维茨这样的左派知识分子，将量子物理学与政治和更广泛的社会问题联系起来时，他们正在踏上一条被伟大的量子物理学家的科学权威合法化的老路，在他们的著作中我们找到了今天后现代主义过度行为的根源。当索卡尔在他的《社会文本》一文中写道，玻尔的“对后现代主义认识论的预示绝不是偶然的”，他的说法比他想的还要正确。

我们发现自己处于一个特殊的困境中。一方面，要么从科学到文化和政治的推论的整个事业是错误的、没有根据的和牵强的—在这种情况下，我们最伟大的一些物理学家和我们的后现代主义批评家一样有罪。或者，在另一方面，从科学到更广泛的文化领域的推论是一项有意义和深刻的活动—在这种情况下，我们必须判断后现代主义文化分析家的工作是可敬的、值得赞扬的和重要的，尽管我们可能对他们中的一些人的科学文盲感到遗憾，也许甚至谴责。

争论的焦点是现实的问题。Sokal和Weinberg以一种情绪化的方式重新表达了对科学现实的热切信仰，认为它是客观的、独立于观察者的东西。温伯格不以为然地引用了库恩的话，“让我强调一下，我并不是在暗示存在一个科学无法触及的现实。我的观点是，在科学哲学中，现实的概念通常是没有意义的”。

库恩的话可以得到以下更有力的支持：

“’物理世界是真实的’……[这]句话在我看来，本身是没有意义的，就像一个人说： ‘物理世界是鸡肋。`物理世界是鸡毛蒜皮的’。在我看来，‘真实’是一个本质上空洞、无意义的类别（鸽子笼）......”

这不是来自德里达或库恩，甚至不是来自玻尔或海森堡。这些话属于阿尔伯特-爱因斯坦—一个与观察者无关的现实的坚定信仰者，类似的说法在爱因斯坦已发表和未发表的著作中出现过很多次。物理理论作为现实的镜子的想法对爱因斯坦来说是完全陌生的，“物理学家永远无法将这幅图画与真实的机制进行比较，他甚至无法想象这种比较的可能性或意义“。

虽然爱因斯坦对客观现实的信念与温伯格和索卡尔相似，但他对现实概念的论证却并非如此。事实上，爱因斯坦并不是“天真的现实主义者”，尽管哥本哈根正统派对他的立场进行了这样的讽刺。他嘲笑许多科学家不加批判地接受的现实的“对应”观点。爱因斯坦充分认识到，世界并没有两次呈现在我们面前—第一次是它本身，第二次是它在理论上的描述—所以我们可以将我们的理论“副本”与“真实的东西”进行比较，世界只给了我们一次—通过我们最好的科学理论。因此，爱因斯坦认为有必要将这个客观现实的概念建立在我们最好的科学理论的不变特征上。

量子物理学的创始人—玻尔、玻恩、保利和海森堡—歪曲并嘲笑爱因斯坦对客观的、与观察者无关的现实的“天真” 信念。他们声称，玻尔的互补性原则不可避免地意味着，人们无法再在物理学中构建一个统一的、客观的、与观察者无关的描述。(相关的引文可在索卡尔文章的开头方便地找到）。

在量子领域，人们只能有部分的、同样正确的、但相互不相容的观点，在相互排斥的实验安排中披露。在其中一些安排中，电子表现为波，在另一些安排中则表现为粒子。不可能将部分图片合并成一个统一的图片，而且谈论物理现实是独立于观察行为而存在的也是没有意义的。受玻尔意义深远的“修订我们的现实概念”的启发，一些物理学家在解释约翰-贝尔的理论结果和阿兰-阿斯佩克特的实验时认为， “当没有人看时，月亮明显不存在”。(另见《今日物理》1985年4月第38页）。

约翰-惠勒对一个物理学家和宇宙之间关于他们各自“现实”的想象中的对话的描述是一个有说服力的例子。宇宙对物理学家说： “我为你的存在提供空间和时间。在我出现之前，没有之前，也不会有之后[之后]，我不存在了。你是位于一个不重要的星系中的一点不重要的物质。 ” “我们应该如何回答？ ”惠勒问道。我们是否应该说， “是的，好的宇宙，没有你，我就不可能出现了。然而，你，伟大的系统，是由现象构成的；而每一个现象都依赖于观察行为。没有像我这样的基本登记行为，你甚至不可能存在。 ”

一种女性的方式

如果物理现实只不过是科学家的记录行为，那么也许--一些社会科学家认为--历史和社会现实只不过是一种解释行为。社会学家唐-汉德曼（Don Handelman）的以下几句话很有代表性：

我们再也不能轻松地假设自然（和文化）存在于“外面”，可以在不评估我们自己的角色和操作的情况下被映射和发现。粒子物理学家Werner Heisenberg……这样说，“当我们谈到当代精确科学提供的自然图景时，我们实际上不再是指自然的图景，而是指我们与自然关系的图景。…” 由于我们现在理解“自然的力量”（和文化）是可以通过我们自己获得的，所以这些已经成为我们的’主体’。这些观点在后现代科学中具有一定的突出性“。

唐娜-威尔希尔从海森堡、玻尔和保利的著作中得出了更具深远意义（有人会说是牵强附会）的推论。她的结论是，量子力学描述是“疯狂的不符合逻辑的”，事实上，科学和艺术之间没有实质性的区别。 海森堡和玻尔曾写道，“在发现量子物理学时发生的事情将科学和艺术的方法结合起来[斜体为原文]。科学、文学和艺术必须相互重视，并纳入和分享彼此的方法和形式。在[量子力学]中，情感、激情和疯狂的猜测成为科学的基本要素”。

威尔希尔一定是受到了启发，或者至少是得到了安慰，就像玻尔的下面这段话：

“这样的考虑不涉及缺乏对艺术的伟大创造为我们提供的灵感的赞赏，因为它指出了我们的立场和谐的整体性的特点。事实上，在放弃逻辑分析的程度增加，并反过来允许所有字符串的情感，诗歌，绘画和音乐的相互作用，包含极端模式之间的桥梁的可能性，作为那些特点是实用主义和神秘主义。我们论证的目的是强调，所有的经验，无论是科学、哲学还是艺术，只要可能对人类有帮助，都必须能够通过人类的表达方式进行交流。 ”

受玻尔的实用主义和神秘主义认识方式的结合的启发，威尔希尔提出了她对女性做科学的方式的设想—一个索卡尔的讽刺诗可以逐字逐句引用的设想：

“我期待着有一天，所有关于思想和科学的讨论将包括诗歌、口述历史、文学和情感典故。我渴望读到这样一位天文学家—数学家，他对她在观察时在身体中体验到的节奏、音乐和舞蹈给予了同样多的关注，就像她对被观察者给予的关注一样：她将宇宙的舞蹈、流动和能量还原为公式或猜测。”

当爱因斯坦警告玻尔有关不负责任的， “对现实的摇摆不定的游戏”，玻尔在玩，他可能有这样的论证？爱因斯坦能否预见到索卡尔所讽刺的事态？

必然性的修辞

当玻尔推测物理学中的 "波粒二象性 "与理性和情感的 "互补性 "或不同文化之间的互补性之间的相似之处时，他断言，这种比较不只是模糊的类比；它们必然来自 "对我们概念的逻辑使用的分析"。玻尔和他的支持者提出了他的二元论哲学的互补性在物理学中不是一个可行的方式来解释量子形式主义，而是作为唯一的逻辑上可能的方式。

这种不可避免的修辞意味着哥本哈根哲学的任何替代方案在逻辑上是不可能的，从而掩盖了量子力学形式主义的富有成效的解释自由。这样一来，互补性哲学虽然作为可能的解释选项之一当然是合法的，但却变成了一种僵化的意识形态，误导了科学家和受过教育的非科学家们。

通过使用简单的类比和直观的吸引力，但误导，隐喻的形象，玻尔建立了所谓的必要的连接之间的无政府状态，波粒二象性和不可能的客观统一的描述在量子领域。人们不需要量子力学的技术知识就能读懂玻尔对由螺栓、弹簧、杆子和隔膜组成的互斥实验安排的操作分析。

虽然公开放弃了对玻尔的批评，但他的许多同时代的人不同意他的特殊坚持，不可能设计新的非经典概念 - 这种坚持对理论化的自由施加了严格的限制。正是在这个问题上，其他物理学家的沉默产生了最深远的影响，这种沉默造成并维持了一种错觉，即人们不需要量子力学的技术知识就能完全理解其革命性的认识论教训。许多后现代主义的科学批评家都中了这种论证策略的圈套，并随意宣称物理学本身无可争议地驱逐了客观现实的概念。

“我们现在知道得更多”

在《纽约书评》文章发表几个月后的一次交流中，温伯格承认量子理论的创始人在他们的“明显的主观主义”中是错误的，并宣布“我们现在知道得更多”。我们现在到底知道了什么？我们是否更清楚地知道，人们不应该从物理领域推断到政治领域—如果是的话，为什么？还是我们更清楚地知道，对量子物理学的“正统”解释—那个自信地宣布最终推翻因果关系和普通现实概念的解释--并不是唯一可能的解释，而且，最终，它甚至可能不是幸存的那个？

玻尔和其他量子物理学创始人的哲学声明并不仅仅是一种不合时宜的好奇心，物理学家和科普作家的大量流行文章继续宣称玻尔的现实概念战胜了爱因斯坦的概念，特别是自贝尔的开创性理论成果和1980年代初阿斯佩克的实验对其进行确认以来。这些作家没有提到，贝尔结果中最突出的特征，即非局域性，实际上自然包含在大卫-博姆的因果关系、独立于观察者的标准量子理论的替代方案中。(见《今日物理》3月第42页和4月第38页上谢尔顿-戈尔茨坦的文章）。博姆的非局域理论和最近的变种以一种直接的方式纳入了贝尔结果的本质，而不需要求助于玻尔的哲学。

保罗-格罗斯和诺曼-莱维特的《高等迷信》一书激发了索卡尔的事业，当阿罗诺维茨“天真地呼应……经典物理学中隐含的对事物的因果和决定论观点已被不可逆转地驱逐”时，他嘲笑道。为此，格罗斯和莱维特引用了戈尔茨坦、Detlef Dürr和Nino Zanghi的工作，沿着波米亚路线。但阿罗诺维茨一直在依赖决定论不可避免和最终被推翻的断言，这些断言由20世纪物理学最尊贵的英雄们无休止地重复。除非我们这个时代的物理学家公开宣布哥本哈根正统理论不再是强制性的，否则阿罗诺维茨或其他非物理学家如何能抵制这些过去的杰出人物的权威？这样的公开声明可以大大减少后现代主义学术废话的爆炸性扩散，这对索卡尔和温伯格来说是非常骇人的。

对后现代主义关于科学的文化研究的反对者们从索卡尔事件中自信地得出结论  “皇帝……没穿衣服”，但是，那些赤裸裸的皇帝到底是谁？我们应该嘲笑谁？

参考文献：

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23354462.pdf

http://hps.elte.hu/~gk/Sokal/Sokal/Beller.html

原文：

The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?

The philosophical pronouncements of Bohr, Born, Heisenberg and Pauli deserve some of the blame for the excesses of the postmodernist critique of science.

by Mara Beller

The hoax perpetrated by New York University theoretical physicist Alan Sokal in 1996 on the editors of the journal Social Text quickly became widely known and hotly debated. (See Physics Today January 1997, page 61, and March 1997, page 73.) "Transgressing the Boundaries -- Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," was the title of the parody he slipped past the unsuspecting editors.

Many readers of Sokal's article characterized it as an ingenious exposure of the decline of the intellectual standards in contemporary academia, and as a brilliant parody of the postmodern nonsense rampant among the cultural studies of science. Sokal's paper is variously, so we read, "a hilarious compilation of pomo gibberish", "an imitation of academic babble", and even "a transformative hermeneutics of total bullshit". Many scientists reported having "great fun" and "a great laugh" reading Sokal's article. Yet whom, exactly, are we laughing at?

As telling examples of the views Sokal satirized, one might quote some other statements. Consider the following extrapolation of Heisenberg's uncertainty and Bohr's complementarity into the political realm:

"The thesis `light consists of particles' and the antithesis `light consists of waves' fought with one another until they were united in the synthesis of quantum mechanics. ...Only why not apply it to the thesis Liberalism (or Capitalism), the antithesis Communism, and expect a synthesis, instead of a complete and permanent victory for the antithesis? There seems to be some inconsistency. But the idea of complementarity goes deeper. In fact, this thesis and antithesis represent two psychological motives and economic forces, both justified in themselves, but, in their extremes, mutually exclusive. ...there must exist a relation between the latitudes of freedom df and of regulation dr, of the type df dr=p. ...But what is the `political constant' p? I must leave this to a future quantum theory of human affairs. »

Before you burst out laughing at such "absurdities," let me disclose the author: Max Born, one of the venerated founding fathers of quantum theory [3]. Born's words were not written tongue in cheek; he soberly declared that "epistemological lessons [from physics] may help towards a deeper understanding of social and political relations". Such was Born's enthusiasm to infer from the scientific to the political realm, that he devoted a whole book to the subject, unequivocally titled Physics and Politics.

Science and religion

Born's words are not an exception. One might even be more bewildered to read Wolfgang Pauli's philosophical publications and his unpublished scientific correspondence:

"...science and religion must have something to do with each other. (I do not mean `religion within physics', nor do I mean `physics inside religion', sincs either one would certainly be one-sided, but rather I mean the placing of both of them within a whole.) I would like to make an attempt to give a name to that which the new idea of reality brings to my mind: the idea of reality of the symbol. ...It contains something of the old concept of God as well as the old concept of matter (an example from physics: the atom. The primary qualities of filling space have been lost. If it were not a symbol how could it be `both wave and particle'?). The symbol is symmetrical with respect to `this side' and `beyond'...the symbol is like a god that exerts an influence on man. »

One of the more absurd examples of Sokal's satire, according to the author himself, involves the inference from quantum physics to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic ideas. "Even non-scientist readers might well wonder what in heaven's name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis" -- exclaimed Sokal in the Lingua Franca article in which he promptly revealed his hoax. Nonetheless, a "deep" connection between quantum theory and psychology was extensively discussed in the writings of Pauli, Niels Bohr and Pascual Jordan. Jordan explored the "formal" parallels between quantum physics and Freudian psychoanalysis, and even parapsychology. Pauli, in all seriousness, proceeded from quantum concepts to the idea of the unconscious, to Jungian archetypes, and even to extra sensory perception.

The following words of Bohr are among the more sober statements of these founding fathers with regard to the connection between the quantum and the psychological domains:

"...this domain [psychology] ... is distinguished by reciprocal relationships which depend on the unity of our consciousness abd which exhibit a striking similarity with the physical consequences of the quantum of action. We are thinking here of well-known characteristics of emotion and volition which are quite incapable of being represented by visualizable pictures. In particular, the apparent contrast between the conscious onward flow of associative thinking and the preservation of the unity of the personality exhibit...analogy with the relation between the wave description of the motions of material particles, ...and their indestructible individuality. »

The rarely noticed mistake

Like the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, whom Steven Weinberg attacked in his 1996 New York Review of Books article on Sokal's hoax, Bohr was notorious for the obscurity of his writing. Yet physicists relate to Derrida's and Bohr's obscurities in fundamentally different ways: to Derrida's with contempt, to Bohr's with awe. Bohr's obscurity is attributed, time and again, to a "depth and subtlety" that mere mortals are not equipped to comprehend.

Perhaps disclosure of another editorial oversight will demonstrate my point. In a widely used compendium of papers on quantum theory, edited by John Wheeler and Wojciech Zurek, the pages of Bohr's reprinted article are out of order. This paper (Bohr's response to the famous 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen critique of the standard Copenhagen interpretation) is widely cited in contemporary literature by physicists and philosophers of science. Yet I have never heard anybody complain that something is wrong with Bohr's text in this volume. The mistake, it seems, is rarely noticed, even though it occurs in both the hard- and the soft-cover editions.

When physicists failed to find meaning in Bohr's writings, no matter how hard they tried, they blamed themselves, not Bohr. (Einstein and Schrödinger were among the rare exceptions.) Carl von Weizsäcker's testimony is a striking example of the overpowering, almost disabling, impact of Bohr's authority. After meeting with Bohr, Von Weizsäcker asked himself: "What had Bohr meant? What must I understand to be able to tell what he meant and why he was right? I tortured myself on endless solitary walks." Note that von Weizsäcker did not ask, "Was Bohr right?" or "To what extent, or on what issue, was Bohr right?" or "on what issues was Bohr right?", but, quite incredibly, he wondered what must one assume and in what way must one argue in order to render Bohr right?

Astonishing statements, hardly distinguishable from those satirized by Sokal, abound in the writings of Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Born and Jordan. And they are not just casual, incidental remarks. Bohr intended his philosophy of complementarity to be an overarching epistemological principle---applicable to physics, biology, psychology, anthropology. He expected complementarity to be a substitute for the lost religion. He believed that complementarity should be taught to children in elementary schools. Pauli argued that "the most important task of our time" was the elaboration of a new quantum concept of reality that would unify science and religion. Born stated that quantum philosophy would help humanity cope with the political reality of the era after World War II. Heisenberg expressed the hope that the results of quantum physics "will exert their influence upon the wider fields of the world of ideas [just as] the changes at the end of the Renaissance transformed the cultural life of the succeeding epochs. »

So much confidence did these architects of the quantum theory repose in its far-reaching implications for the cultural realm, that they corresponded about establishing an "Institute for Complementarity" in the US. The aim of such an institute, to be headed by Bohr, would be to promote Bohrian philosophy. The aging Born begged Bohr not to leave him out of this enterprise.[8]

Postmodernist babble

Sokal's hoax was ingeniously contrived. The gradual slide from the Bohr and Heisenberg quotes at the beginning of his article into postmodernist babble about the connection between science and politics is all too natural. When feminists like Donna Willshire, or intellectuals of the left like Stanley Aronowitz, connect quantum physics with politics and wider social issues, they're treading a well-worn path legitimized by the scientific authority of the great quantum physicists, in whose writings we find the roots of the postmodernist excesses of today. When Sokal, in his Social Text article, wrote that Bohr's "foreshadowing of postmodernist epistemology is by no means coincidental," he was more correct than he intended to be.

We find ourselves in a peculiar predicament. On the one hand, either the whole enterprise of inferring from the scientific to the cultural and political is misconceived, unfounded and far-fetched---in which case some of our greatest physicists are no less guilty than our postmodernist critics. Or, on the other hand, drawing inferences from the scientific to the wider cultural domain is a meaningful and profound activity---in which case we must judge the undertaking of the postmodernist cultural analysts to be respectable, commendable and important, even though we might regret, and perhaps even condemn, the scientific illiteracy of some of them.

The focal point of the controversy is the issue of reality. Sokal and Weinberg repaetedly express, in an emotionally charged way, an ardent belief in scientific reality as something objective and independent of the observer. Weinberg disapprovingly quoted Kuhn's words: "I am not suggesting, let me emphasize, that there is a reality which science fails to get at. My point is rather that no sense can be made of the notion of reality as it has ordinarily functioned in philosophy of science. »

Kuhn's words can be supported by the following, stronger ones:

"`The pysical world is real.' ...[That] statement appears to me, however, to be, in itself, meaningless, as if one said: `The physical world is cock-a-doodle-do.' It appears to me that the `real' is an intrinsically empty, meaningless category (pigeon hole)… »

This is not from Derrida or Kuhn, and not even from Bohr or Heisenberg. The words belong to Albert Einstein -- a staunch believer in observer-independent reality. Similar statements appear many times in Einstein's published and unpublished writings. The idea of a physical theory as a mirror of reality was completely foreign to Einstein: "[The physicist] will never be able to compare this picture with the real mechanism, and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparicon. »

While Einstein's belief in an objecitve reality is similar to that of Weinberg and Sokal, his arguments for his conception of reality are not. In fact, Einstein was no "naive realist," despite such caricaturing of his stand by the Copenhagen orthodoxy. He ridiculed the "correspondence" view of reality that many scientists accept uncritically. Einstein fully realized that the world is not presented to us twice -- first as it is, and second, as it is theoretically described -- so we can compare our theoretical "copy" with the "real thing". The world is given to us only once -- through our best scientific theories. So Einstein deemed it necessary to ground this concept of objective reality in the invariant characteristics of our best scientific theories.

The founders of quantum physics -- Bohr, Born, Pauli and Heisenberg -- misrepresented and ridiculed Einstein's "naive" belief in an objective, observer-independent reality. Bohr's complementarity principle, they claimed, inevitably implies that one can no longer construct a unified, objective, observer-independent description in physics. (The relevant quotations are conveniently available at the beginning of Sokal's article).

In the quantum domain one can have only partial, equally correct, yet mutually incompatible perspectives, disclosed in mutually exclusive experimental arrangements. In some of these arrangements an electron behaves as a wave, in others as a particle. It is not possible to combine the partial pictures into a unified picture, and it is not meaningful to talk about physical reality as existing independently of the act of observation. Inspired by Bohr's far-reaching "revision of our concept of reality," some physicists, interpreting John Bell's theoretical results and Alain Aspect's experiments, contend that "the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks". (See also Physics Today April 1985, page 38.)

John Wheeler's description of an imaginary dialogue between a physicist and the universe about their respective "realities" is a telling example: The universe says to a physicist, "I supply the space and time for your existence. There was no before, before I came into being, and there will be no after [after] I cease to exist. You are an unimportant bit of matter located in an unimportant galaxy." "How shall we reply?" asks Wheeler. Shall we say, "Yes, OK universe, without you I would not have been able to come into being. Yet you, great system, are made of phenomena; and every phenomenon rests on an act of observation. You could not even exist without an elementary act of registration such as mine. »

A female way

If physical reality is nothing but a scientist's act of registration, then perhaps--some social scientists have argued--historical and social reality is nothing but an act of interpretation. The following lines by the sociologist Don Handelman are typical:

"No longer may we assume with ease that nature (and culture) exist `out there', to be mapped and discovered without evaluating our own roles and operations at one and the same time. The particle physicist, Werner Heisenberg ... put it this way: "When we speak of a picture of nature provided by contemporary exact science, we do not actually mean any longer a picture of nature, but rather a picture of our relation to nature. ..." As we now understand `forces of nature' (and culture) to be accessible to us through ourselves, so these have become our `subject'. These views have some prominence in postmodern science. »

Donna Wilshire draws more far-reaching (some would say far-fetched) inferences from the writings of Heisenberg, Bohr and Pauli. She concludes that quantum mechanical description is "wildly illogical", and that there is, in fact, no substantive difference between science and art: "Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr have written that what happened in the discovery of quantum physics united the methods of science and art [italics in the original]. ... Science, literature and art must value one another and incorporate and share one another's methods and forms. In [quantum mechanics], emotion, passion, and wild speculation become essential to science. »

Wilshire must have been inspired, or at least reassured, by something like the following quote from Bohr:

"Such considerations involve no lack of appreciation of the inspiration which the great creations of art offer us by pointing to features of harmonious wholeness in our position. Indeed, in renouncing logical analysis to an increased degree and in turn allowing the interplay of all strings of emotion, poetry, painting and music to contain possibilities of bridging between extreme modes as those characterized as pragmatic and mystic. ... Th aim of our argumentation is to emphasize that all experience, whether in science, philosophy or art, which may be helpful to mankind, must be capable of being communicated by human means of expression."

Inspired by Bohr's union of the pragmatic and the mystic way of knowing, Wilshire presents her vision of a female way of doing science--a vision that Sokal's satire could have quoted verbatim:

"I anticipate the day when all discussions of ideas and science will include poetry, oral history, literary and emotional allusions. I am eager to read the astronomer-mathematician who gives as much attention to the rhythms, music, and dance she experiences in her body while she is observing as she gives to the observed: the cosmis dance, flow, and energy she is reducing to formula or speculating about. »

When Einstein warned Bohr about the irresponsible, "shaky game with reality" that Bohr was playing, could he have had this kind of argumentation in mind? Could Einstein have foreseen the state of affairs satirized by Sokal?

The rhetoric of inevitability

When Bohr speculated about parallels between "wave-particle duality" in physics and the "complementarity" of reason and emotion, or complementarity between different cultures, he asserted that the comparisons were not just vague analogies; they flowed necessarily from "the very analysis of the logical use of our concepts". Bohr and his supporters presented his dualistic philosophy of complementarity in physics not as one feasible way of interpreting the quantum formalism, but rather as the only logically possible way.

This rhetoric of inevitability implied the logical impossibility of any alternative to the Copenhagen philosophy, thus concealing the fruitful interpretive freedom of the quantum mechanical formalism. In this way, the philosophy of complementarity, while certainly legitimate as one of the possible interpretive options, was turned into a rigid ideology, misleading both scientists and educated nonscientists.

By using simple analogies and intuitively appealing, yet misleading, metaphorical images, Bohr established supposedly necessary connections between acausality, wave-particle duality and the impossibility of an objective unified description in the quantum domain. One needed no technical knowledge of quantum mechanics to read Bohr's operational analysis of mutually exclusive experimental arrangements consisting of bolts, springs, rods and diaphragms.

While publicly abstaining from criticizing Bohr, many of his contemporaries did not share his peculiar insistence on the impossibility of devising new nonclassical concepts--an insistence that put rigid strictures on the freedom to theorize. It is on this issue that the silence of other physicists had the most far-reaching consequences. This silence created and sustained the illusion that one needed no technical knowledge of quantum mechanics to fully comprehend its revolutionary epistemological lessons. Many postmodernist critics of science have fallen prey to this strategy of argumentation and freely proclaimed that physics itself irrevoably banished the notion of objective reality.

`We know better now’

In an exchange several months after his New York Review of Books article, Weinberg admitted that the founders of quantum theory had been wrong in their "apparent subjectivism," and declared that "we know better now". What exactly do we know better now? Do we know better that one should not infer from the physical to the political realm--and if yes, why? Or do we know better that the `orthodox' interpretation of quantum physics--the one that confidently announced the final overthrow of causality and the ordinary conception of reality-- is not the only possible interpretation, and that, ultimately, it might not even be the surviving one?

The philosophical pronouncements of Bohr and other founders of quantum physics are not just an anachronistic curiosity. A flood of popular writings by physicists and science writers continues to proclaim the victory of Bohr's conception of reality over Einstein's, especially since Bell's seminal theoretical results and their confirmation by Aspect's experiments in the early 1980s. These writers do not mention that the most prominent feature of Bell's results, nonlocality, is, in fact, naturally contained in David Bohm's causal, observer-independent alternative to the standard quantum theory. (See the article by Sheldon Goldstein in Physics Today, March, page 42 and April, page 38.) Bohm's nonlocal theory and recent variants of it incorporate the essence of Bell's results in an immediate way, without recourse to Bohr's philosophy.

Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, whose book Higher Superstition inspired Sokal's undertaking, ridicule Aronowitz when he "naively echoes...the view that the causal and deterministic view of things implicit in classical physics has been irrevocably banished." To this end, Gross and Levitt cite the work of Goldstein, Detlef Dürr and Nino Zanghi along Bohmian lines. But Aronowitz had been relying on the assertions of the inevitable and final overthrow of determinism, endlessly repeated by the most honored heroes of 20th-century physics. How can Aronowitz or other non-physicists resist the authority of such past eminences, unless the physicists of our time publicly declare that the Copenhagen orthodoxy is no longer obligatory? Such a public declaration could have diminished greatly the explosive proliferation of the postmodernist academic nonsense, so appalling to Sokal and Weinberg.

The opponents of the postmodernist cultural studies of science conclude confidently from the Sokal affair that "the emperors ... have no clothes". But who, exactly, are all those naked emperors? At whom should we be laughing?