Twenty years ago, the academic journal Social Text published an article with the trendy title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Herme­neutics of Quantum Gravity.” The article claimed that quantum gravity is nothing but a social and linguistic construct that physicists are trying to pass off as a genuine account of the universe around us. Theoretical physics, the article concluded, is just a bunch of meaningless words and symbols.

The actual meaningless words and symbols were those in the article itself, which consisted of high-flown gibberish. It was a postmodern spoof of postmodernism.