Several sources have referred to the Bogdanov affair as a "reverse Sokal" hoax, drawing a comparison with the Sokal affair, where the physicist Alan Sokal published a deliberately fraudulent and indeed nonsensical article in the humanities journal Social Text. Sokal's original aim had been to test the effects of the intellectual trend he called, "for want of a better term, postmodernism ". Worried by what he considered a "more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment ", Sokal decided to perform an experiment which he later cheerfully admitted was both unorthodox and uncontrolled, provoking a maelstrom of reactions which, to his surprise, received coverage in Le Monde and even the front page of The New York Times. The physicist John Baez compared the two events in his October 2002 post to the sci.physics.research newsgroup. Sociologist of science Harry Collins noted that all of the early reports of the incident made reference to the Sokal affair, and he speculated that without Sokal's precedent bringing the idea of hoax publications to mind, the Bogdanov papers would have sunk into the general obscurity of non-influential scientific writing.