This volume comes in the wake of a stinging practical joke that brought many of the professional tensions between scientists and humanists into sharp relief. One of the editors, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, and one of the contributors, literary scholar Andrew Ross, coedited a 1996 issue of the academic journal Social Text that was devoted to "postmodern" studies of science-contemporary scholarly work that emphasizes the influence of cultural values and institutional politics on science. That special issue featured an essay by physicist Alan Sokal, who, in discussing a "transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity," expressed the critically fashionable view that scientific knowledge is often not truly rational, and that claims of scientific objectivity can mask pursuit of the interests of dominant groups.

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