Remember the Sokal affair? That was when an NYU physics professor submitted a parody article ostensibly about science, but using meaningless jargon to a journal of cultural studies, and it got accepted. Oops.
Well, David Simmons-Duffin, a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard, has created a similar parody site called the snarXiv. So far, the site uses context-free grammars to randomly generate meaningless abstracts involving fancy terminology. For instance,
We verify an involved correspondence between decay constants in supergravity deformed by multi-fermion operators and path integrals in superconformal superconformal QFTs surrounded by (p,q) instantons. The determination of superconformal effects localizes to AdS_n x P^m. Therefore, some work was done among mathematicians on a model of bubbles. This result has long been understood in terms of the Wilsonian effective action. The Virosoro algebra is also bounded. After reviewing fragmentation functions, we derive that spinodal inflation at $\Lambda_{QCD}$ depends on the Seiberg-dual of the Landau-Ginzburg Model.
There is also a game where you can try to distinguish the fake abstracts from the real ones (on the arXiv, the actual site). I’m ashamed to say that I’m worse than a monkey at physics.
Now, someone who knows about programming should do the same for mathematics, and use the key words: “moduli spaces, etale cohomology, $latex \infinity$-groupoidification, Deligne-Mumford stacks, perverse sheaves, Calabi-Yau manifolds, and homotopical category theory.”
Edit: Wait, there’s more! Apparently, the creator has a theorem generator and even a program that can generate philosophy.
June 11, 2010 at 7:54 am
The saddest thing of all? I’d like to read that paper…and I’d just be assuming it was written by someone for whom English is a third or so language. Once I got into a paper with that abstract, I might be able to tell it was bullshit…but the abstract…not too far into implausible.
June 12, 2010 at 10:15 pm
@ akhil
referring to the high school biology of evolution and punning your worse-than-a-monkey stand on physics,
Your-physics belongs in the monkey-verse
(hyphens alluding to how your ancestor gave you the biomechanical legacy of apes)
June 17, 2010 at 10:41 am
I’m hovering between “better than a monkey” and “undergraduate” — the best one I’ve gotten so far was “Some general examples.” … seriously?
I noticed that instantons and “the Mu problem” are usually fake. And I usually just pick the shorter title, unless it’s one or two words–then I just guess as to whether that’s total BS or not.
lol 11 right in a row!… aw I missed the next one.
Also, large LaTeX expressions often can’t be faked.
Ended with 63/100 (oh my god I have too much time on my hands…!)
June 17, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Oh, I just did about ten or so before getting frustrated with my inability to discern real physics from the output of carefully constructed context-free languages and then quitting…