Episode 98. Retrospective: Tom Lehrer's Mathematics

The Science History Podcast, now in its 9th year, has spanned Trump's first term in office, four years of the Biden Administration, and a year of the second Trump Administration, not to mention a global pandemic, horrific wars around the world, and the emergence of AI. So now seems like the perfect moment for some levity. The master of musical satire, Tom Lehrer, passed away in 2025. Here is my celebration of Lehrer's ability to make us laugh during the even more tumultuous times of the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and political assassinations and violent polarization.

Today's episode is a discussion on the history of PFAS, or forever chemicals, including their accidental development, incorporation into commercial products, concerns about health effects, and environmental contamination and remediation. My guest is Sharon Udasin. Sharon is a Colorado-based environmental journalist and author of Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America. She was a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2019-2020 and received a SEAL Environmental Journalism Award in 2023. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Journalism School, she has reported for numerous publications over the past two decades — most recently for The Hill.

The weather has always been a critical element of the human experience - deadly during storms and droughts, sustaining when aligned with the harvest schedule, beautiful and frightening, and integrated into the myths and religions of all societies. How did a scientific understanding of the weather come about? Here to guide us on this question is Simon Winchester. Simon's articles and approximately 30 books range in topic from travel writing to politics, geography, biography, and science history. Simon is best known for his books The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, The Map That Changed the World, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. In 2006, Simon was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the II. Today we discuss Simon's new book about the weather entitled, The Breath of the Gods, published by HarperCollins.

In Episodes 10 and 11 of the Science History Podcast, I interviewed James Muller on the role that Winston Churchill played in the unparalleled advancement of science and technology during the first half of the 20th Century, particularly as it related to the two world wars. In today's episode, Jim returns to discuss Churchill and an earlier war fought in the Sudan at the end of the 19th Century. Jim is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Anchorage and one of the world's foremost authorities on Churchill. For more than a quarter century, Jim has chaired the Board of Academic Advisers of the International Churchill Society. He is the author of many works on Churchill, including edited and scholarly reprintings of Churchill's interwar books Thoughts and Adventures and Great Contemporaries. Today we discuss his remarkable new edition of the two-volume Churchill book The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, published in 2021 by St. Augustine's Press, which won the Churchill Literary Award from the International Churchill Society. St. Augustine's Press also published Jim's 2024 scholarly edition of Churchill's book My Early Life, A Roving Commission.

Our health, and the health of wildlife, depends on a clean environment. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, our environment has suffered from waves of pollution as different technologies came to the fore, each with its own set of practical benefits and associated chemical waste. Perhaps the most insidious of these environmental pollutants is lead. With us to discuss the history of lead as an environmental contaminant is Bruce Lanphear. For over 30 years, Bruce has investigated how toxic chemicals harm human health, especially the health of children. His research helped shape U.S. federal standards for lead in air, water, and house dust, and played a key role in the landmark conclusion that no amount of lead is safe for children.

The year 2025 has seen the most aggressive moves ever by the US executive branch against scientific research as the Trump Administration has gutted federal science and regulatory agencies and cancelled billions of dollars in research grants that had already been awarded to universities. With me to discuss the Trump Administration attacks on university research is Claudia Polsky. Claudia is a clinical professor of law and the founding director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley.

In Episode 62, I interviewed two Reuters journalists about how industry and government in the United States use conservation easements to avoid rigorous cleanup of contaminated sites. Today, one of those journalists, Jaimi Dowdell, is back to discuss how a federal agency responsible for community health assessments has a history of failing to protect the communities that seek its aid. Jaimi was part of the Reuters team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. Today we discuss the Reuters special report published in August 2024 and entitled, "How a US health agency became a shield for polluters."

In prior episodes, we examined political interference and bias in science in a few contexts, including episode 3 on the history of U.S. congressional attacks on science, episode 57 on types of bias, episode 65 on ideology and science, and episode 84 on the academy's ideological march to the left and antisemitism on American college campuses. Since those episodes, America went back to the future with the election for the second time of Donald Trump, and the Trump Administration has attacked elite American universities such as Columbia and Harvard with historic intensity. These attacks are motivated by the right's revulsion with the dominance of leftist bias on these universities. We do not know what the outcome of these battles will be. Indeed, as of this recording, Harvard University is challenging the Trump Administration in the American courts, while many other universities are trying to placate the administration or avoid its gaze. However, the fundamental complaint by the right, that elite universities have become bastions of the left and lack diversity of thought, warrants an examination. In today's episode, I explore this topic with my brother Bill. We discuss how political bias distorts the science produced in universities, especially in the social sciences, and we discuss the implications. Bill is the author of over 150 articles in psychology, as well as the books The Social Leap, published in 2018, and The Social Paradox, published in 2025, both by Harper Collins Publishers.

In prior episodes, I have interviewed many people about the history of physics and physics-adjacent topics such as nuclear disarmament. Many of the physicists we have discussed also made forays into biology. Today I explore this transition of physicists working in biology with William Lanouette. Bill is a writer and public policy analyst who has specialized in the history of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

Prior to the rise of Nazism, the University of Göttingen hosted most of the top physicists in the world, either as resident or visiting scientists. With us to discuss the history of physics in Göttingen are Tim Salditt, Kurt Schönhammer, and Sarah Köster. In this conversation over tea at the University of Göttingen, we discuss how Göttingen became a focal point of physics, key moments and people during the decades that Göttingen hosted discovery after discovery, and what happened to the assembly of scholars in Göttingen as Germany descended into the abyss of fascism. Tim Salditt and Sarah Köster are both professors of experimental physics in the Institute for X-Ray Physics, and Kurt Schönhammer is a retired Professor from the Institute for Theoretical Physics.