Norman Levitt expected to spend his life quietly teaching university-level mathematics. Instead, five years ago he suddenly found himself a colonel, or maybe even a general, in what's come to be called "the Science Wars."

In the process, he became the inspiration for one of the decade's very best hoaxes. The outcome of this hoax has been important for science in general and the environment in particular.

To understand the story, we need to look at what was going on in Levitt's life in the early 1990s. Back then, he kept coming across professors in university cultural studies departments who were conducting discussion groups on science. Their theme was that science couldn't be trusted because it was just an outgrowth of the thinking of the white patriarchal culture.

For Levitt, the problem was that these professors didn't seem to know what they were talking about. He challenged them to include practicing scientists in their discussions. He got nowhere; the organizers of the symposia had already made up their minds.

"It was more serious than just these professors saying dopey things," he remembers. "They're attitudes went beyond the faintly ridiculous academic fads, and into real life."

Levitt watched, non-plussed, as a whole academic subculture grew up around the anti-science position. It concerned him. "How do you devise strategies for dealing with problems like global warming or environmental pollution," he worried, "if you don't have an accurate understanding of what's going on?"

Levitt and a fellow scientist, Paul Gross wrote a book, HIGHER SUPERSTITION challenging the anti-science "authorities." Predictably, the people who were making a living with their anti-science positions greeted the book with scathing reviews.

On the other hand, the physicist Alan Sokal, loved the book. After doing some investigating on his own, Sokal concluded that the authors had underestimated the silliness that was going on in the cultural studies departments.

To prove how ridiculous the anti-science establishment was becoming, Sokal came up with an ingenious hoax. He submitted a paper to the cultural studies journal, SOCIAL TEXT that "didn't contain anything resembling a logical sequence of thought." He deliberately used sentences that had no meaning whatsoever.

You can see the flavor of the paper by its title: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.'' If that doesn't make a lot of sense to you, congratulations. It wasn't meant to.

The paper was meant to parody the confused thinking that Sokal felt was common among the people who were attacking science. To his delight, SOCIAL TEXT published the paper.

The editors were apparently unable to recognize absolute, total nonsense. When Sokal publicly revealed that the story was deliberate baloney and that SOCIAL TEXT hadn't been able to tell the difference, The New York Times covered the hoax in a front page story.

The story seized the public imagination. For people sick of academic gobbledygook, Sokal became a hero. He still gets speaking invitations world wide. There are even Internet sites devoted to discussing L'Affaire Sokal.

As for Levitt, he's still teaching mathematics at Rutgers. He's pleased that Sokal's hoax was such a success, and he hopes that it has left science in a stronger position.

He continues to believe that ideas have consequences, and that encouraging science can help us solve the environmental problems that face us and our children.

For more on Levitt's story, read his book, HIGHER SUPERSTITION, Johns Hopkins University Press. It's available in paperback.