Some sociologists of science want to explain how scientific theories develop - without understanding the science itself.
Physicists form a rather closed group of people.
You might well think that this description of science could not be further from reality, and well known physicists, such as Steven Weinberg, David Mermin, Kurt Gottfried and Kenneth Wilson, have offered detailed criticism of these sociological views. Another type of response came from Alan Sokal, a physicist from New York University, who published a now famous hoax article in the journal Social Text in which he parodied the sloppy thinking of some sociologists and philosophers. Some people working in SSK, STS and related areas feel that they have been unfairly attacked by the parody and by our book. These attitudes should not be confused with science studies, which is, in principle, a rational enterprise. This programme, which was related to Thomas Kuhn's earlier work on the history of science, differed from its predecessors by being sociologically more ambitious and by adopting a new conceptual attitude.