The Ultimate 24 Hours

What date most changed the course of history? Professors from various disciplines weigh in.

JUNE 13 , 622

KEVIN REINHART, Religion

This is the date of Muhammad’s hijra to Medina. From that date we see the establishment of the Muslim polity, the securing of Islam as a religion and the growth of Islamdom to include 1.5 billion people and much of the world.

JULY 16, 1945

LEE WITTERS, Geisel School of Medicine

Trinity. With the explosion of the first nuclear device, humankind had learned how to eliminate what the Big Bang, the first synthesis of the molecules of life and natural selection by evolution, had created on our small planet. As Robert Oppenheimer said, referring to the Bhagavad-gita, “now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

NOVEMBER 17, 1095

CECILIA GAPOSCHKIN, History

I would argue for the day on which Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade. This launched hundreds of years of warfare be- tween the Christian West and Muslims in the Middle East, played a pivotal role in the construction of Europe and its cultural and religious identity, and established the con- ditions for the ideological conflict between a Christian West and an Islamic Middle East, the legacies of which shape much of today’s geopolitics.

S e pt e m b e r 3 , 1 92 8

eLizabeth WinsLoW, Tuck School

On this date professor Alexander Fleming discovered the bacteria-killing powers of penicillin. Although it took years for this discovery to produce the modern antibi- otics that we use today, it represented a monumental opportunity to improve the way illnesses and infections were treated. Until this point, large numbers of people died not from their original ailments but from the infections or secondary illnesses they contracted while under a physician’s care. The ability to kill bacteria increased survival rates for medical procedures, increased life expectancy and drastically changed the way medicine was practiced. Antibiotics have now been in use for more than 70 years and helped contribute to an almost 30-year increase in average life expectancy.

au g u St 1 , 1 91 4

THOMAS JACK, Biology

The beginning of World War I. This was a war of choice, not necessity, for all of the entrants. The issue that triggered the crisis could have been solved diplomatically. The end result of the war was the end of three empires (Russian, Austria-Hungarian and Ottoman), the contraction of a fourth (Ger- man) and arguably the beginning of the end of a fifth (British). The barbarity and mass slaughter of World War I ushered in an incredibly violent century, unfortunately continuing to the present day.

o c to b e r 1 , 1 9 0 8

bRuCe saCeRDote ’90, Economics

The first production Model T was complet- ed by the Ford Motor Co. on this day. The event represents the freedom of people and goods to move about the country, greater connectivity for all of us, a fundamental shift in how we engage in manufacturing, and the culmination of a critical invention that spurred a burst of economic growth, new activity and new invention.

m a r c h 3 , 1 8 32

bRuCe Duthu ’80, Native American Studies

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Worcester v. Georgia, recognized Native American tribes as sovereign governments with continuing rights to their lands and sys- tems of self-government. In terms of its immediate effects, the case did not prevent the forcible removal of tribes from their ancestral homelands and other official ac- tions designed to eliminate Native cultures from the American landscape. But in its long-term effects, the principle of tribal sovereignty recognized in Worcester serves as the cornerstone legal ruling in guiding contemporary political relations among the federal, state and tribal governments and affirms our aspirations as a nation to be governed by laws—not by the self-interests and greed of men.

n ov e m b e r 24 , 1 859

TODD HEATHERTON, Psychology and Brain Sciences

The day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which would profoundly change science and society. darwin’s theory chal- lenged the assumption of human special status in the animal kingdom, laid the theo- retical groundwork for understanding how organisms adapt to their environments, and helped to provide us with our modern understanding of how the mind works. It is the unifying theory of biological sciences.

o c to b e r 2 0, 66,078,309 b.c.

KEVIN PETERSON, Biology

Hurtling through space at an estimated speed of 20 kilometers per second, a rock the size of Mount Everest struck what would become mexico’s yucatan Penin- sula, generating an explosion equivalent to 100,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT, nearly 10 orders of magnitude greater than the Hiroshima atomic bombing, and ultimately killing off about 75 percent of all the species living on earth on this day, including most of the dinosaurs. Nonetheless, by resetting the macroevolutionary table, the Chicxulub impact ultimately resulted in mammals becoming the dominant terrestrial spe- cies, with one in particular still hell-bent on trying to recreate that one day 66 million years later.

J u n e 2 3 , 1 8 47

JANE LIPSON, Chemistry

This is when William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) met James Joule in Oxford at a meeting of the British Association for the advancement of Science. joule’s meticulous experiments quantified be- yond dispute what are now the laws of thermodynamics, but likely would have gone unnoticed were it not for Thomson, who pointed out that joule’s data were the definite answer to questions about the na- ture of energy and its transformations. The profound implications of these laws were first felt during the Industrial Revolution, and the proscription these laws embody will accompany us forever.

DAYS OF OUR LIVES (clockwise from above): Fleming, Darwin, Oppenheimer (at left), 1908 Model T, British soldiers on August 1, 1914, Pope Urban

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