Reply #24: Here you go

[Posteritatis]

The short version: a physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical piece of jargon-laden pomo crap to Social Text, a moderately prestigious journal populated by postmodernist types. It was deliberately meant to make as little sense as possible while still pandering to pomo style, and was kinda autorefuting and inherently Wrong in a lot of places. (For instance, he 'claims' physical reality itself is a social construct.)

They published it - they published it enthusiastically.

Sokal then followed up by pointing out that the whole thing really says nothing at all, and was mainly meant to see if gobbledygook like that would trip their BS alarms. Not only didn't it, but they loved it, and howled in darkest rage for months when they found out he was pulling their chain. Some of them still get all furious about it when his name's invoked; Sokal's practically the antichrist in a lot of postmodernist-populated university departments.

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ is Sokal's personal page on the whole thing. If you scroll down past the table-of-contents links at the top, the first three bolded links are the original article and his two followups. The second identifies that it's a parody, the third explains why he did it. The rest are a variety of other related links to the whole thing; huge amounts of ink were spilled over it.