I disagree with your generalization that physicists are smarter than professors of French Literature.
Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they’ll be shot. Which group is more worried?
We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks?
What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?
| Author | Paul Graham |
| Work | Re: What You Can’t Say |