- President Wilson proposed "Fourteen Points" at the end of World War I.
- He wanted an organization created – the League of Nations – to settle international disputes.
- The League was a precursor to the United Nations, but the U.S. never actually joined it.
Coming out of the horrendous calamity of World War I, Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, developed a vision for an international world order that could prevent future war. He was passionate about the creation of the League of Nations, an organization where disputes between countries could be mediated through diplomacy – a precursor to the United Nations. The League was created in 1920 but ironically Wilson couldn't get his own country to sign on to the pact. Despite that, Wilson's perseverance in seeking out a new way to ensure communication and collaboration between nations had a tremendously lasting impact and is important to remember, especially as the world teeters on the edge of new conflicts.
Towards the end of World War I, on January 8th 1918, Wilson announced a set of Fourteen Points in a speech to the United States Congress. It was a statement of principles to be considered in peace negotiations that would end the war. A larger goal of the points was to create a new diplomatic order of international cooperation that would prevent another horrific war that ensnared the whole world. Wilson recognized that people don't always have to agree but need to be able to engage with opposing viewpoints in a way that is not confrontational and destructive. The principles provided for the creation the League of Nations which would help mediate disputes and keep peace.
"XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike." – from "Fourteen points" by Woodrow Wilson.
1918 cartoon by E.A. Bushnell of Kaiser Wilhelm considering Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points.
Wilson's speech was regarded as idealistic by some but became an important piece of propaganda for the Allied powers, dropped as leaflets behind enemy lines. Besides conveying the vision of a post-war order, the points were used to convince Germans that they would get a just settlement at the war's end. The reality is that this didn't quite pan out as the differences between the eventual Treaty of Versailles and the promises of Wilson's Fourteen Points angered the Germans. The resentment likely carried over into the rise of National Socialists (and eventually Nazis), think historians.
About a month later, on February 11th, Wilson gave another speech in front of the joint session of Congress, elaborating on his vision:
"We are indomitable in our power of independent action and can in no circumstances consent to live in a world governed by intrigue and force, " said Wilson. "We believe that our own desire for a new international order under which reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail is the desire of enlightened men everywhere. Without that new order the world will be without peace and human life will lack tolerable conditions of existence and development. Having set our hand to the task of achieving it, we shall not turn back."
Exemplifying Wilson's new international order, the League of Nations actually came into existence as a result of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The war-ending agreement was negotiated by diplomats from 32 countries, including the leaders of the "Big Four" comprised of President Wilson, the Prime Minister of France Georges Clemenceau, UK's Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the Italian PM Vittorio Emanuele Orlando.
"Big Four" world leaders at Paris Peace Conference. May 27, 1919. From left to right: Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Premier Vittorio Orlando, Premier Georges Clemenceau, and President Woodrow Wilson.
Courtesy: Library of Congress
The primary goal of the League of Nations, officially founded on January 10th, 1920, was to prevent wars through collective security and disarmament, while resolving international disputes by arbitration and negotiation. It also was to take aim at issues that still sound quite relevant today - human and drug trafficking, labor issues, treatment of native people and minorities, the arms trade and global health concerns, among others.
As of February 1935, the League of Nations counted 58 members. Notably missing among them? The United States. Despite his best efforts to promote the idea back home, President Wilson, who was actually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 for his work in securing peace, wasn't able to convince the U.S. Congress to make the country join this new international body. Wilson ran into concerns which you can hear around the halls of Congress even today – that the country will become the world's policeman and lose its sovereignty.
"I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it" – Woodrow Wilson, 1919.
The first session of the League of Nations in the Salle de Reforme in Geneva. 1920.
Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
An important side note is that President Wilson fell ill while on an intense 8,000-mile tour to promote the League of Nations and decry isolationism across the U.S., ultimately suffering a stroke.
Wilson's efforts can be regarded as quixotic but his own words shed light on why his goal was not only important at the time but should be considered as successful – he saw what the world needed and future generations brought about some version of such a vision:
"There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and that is the power of mankind," said Wilson in 1919. "It is the power of the united moral forces of the world, and in the Covenant of the League of Nations the moral forces of the world are mobilised… And what do they unite for? They enter into a solemn promise to one another that they will never use their power against one anther for aggression; that they never will impair the territorial integrity of a neighbour; that they never will interfere with the political independence of a neighbour; that they will abide by the principle that great populations are entitled to determine their own destiny and that they will not interfere with that destiny; and that no matter what differences arise amongst them they will never resort to war without first having done one or other of two things – either submitted the matter of controversy to arbitration…. or submitted it to the consideration of the council of the League of Nations…"
The lack of U.S. involvement, along with absence of its own army and not getting whole-hearted support from the key powers were all factors that eventually doomed the League of Nations. Clearly, while extremely hopeful in purpose, it wasn't successful in preventing another World War. The United Nations ultimately replaced the League of Nations after World War II as the pre-eminent entity for world diplomacy, incorporating several agencies and organizations founded by the League.
The Gap in the Bridge. Cartoon about the absence of the U.S. from the League of Nations. 1919.
Punch Magazine.
Our hearts beat at a resting rate of 60 to 100 beats per minute. Lots of other things pulse, too. The colors we see and the pitches we hear, for example, are due to the different wave frequencies ("pulses") of light and sound waves.
Now, a study in the journal Geoscience Frontiers finds that Earth itself has a pulse, with one "beat" every 27.5 million years. That's the rate at which major geological events have been occurring as far back as geologists can tell.
A planetary calendar has 10 dates in red
Credit: Jagoush / Adobe Stock
According to lead author and geologist Michael Rampino of New York University's Department of Biology, "Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time. But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random."
The new study is not the first time that there's been a suggestion of a planetary geologic cycle, but it's only with recent refinements in radioisotopic dating techniques that there's evidence supporting the theory. The authors of the study collected the latest, best dating for 89 known geologic events over the last 260 million years:
- 29 sea level fluctuations
- 12 marine extinctions
- 9 land-based extinctions
- 10 periods of low ocean oxygenation
- 13 gigantic flood basalt volcanic eruptions
- 8 changes in the rate of seafloor spread
- 8 times there were global pulsations in interplate magmatism
The dates provided the scientists a new timetable of Earth's geologic history.
Tick, tick, boom
Credit: New York University
Putting all the events together, the scientists performed a series of statistical analyses that revealed that events tend to cluster around 10 different dates, with peak activity occurring every 27.5 million years. Between the ten busy periods, the number of events dropped sharply, approaching zero.
Perhaps the most fascinating question that remains unanswered for now is exactly why this is happening. The authors of the study suggest two possibilities:
"The correlations and cyclicity seen in the geologic episodes may be entirely a function of global internal Earth dynamics affecting global tectonics and climate, but similar cycles in the Earth's orbit in the Solar System and in the Galaxy might be pacing these events. Whatever the origins of these cyclical episodes, their occurrences support the case for a largely periodic, coordinated, and intermittently catastrophic geologic record, which is quite different from the views held by most geologists."
Assuming the researchers' calculations are at least roughly correct — the authors note that different statistical formulas may result in further refinement of their conclusions — there's no need to worry that we're about to be thumped by another planetary heartbeat. The last occurred some seven million years ago, meaning the next won't happen for about another 20 million years.
When I was a junior in college, my electromagnetism professor had an awesome idea. Apart from the usual homework and exams, we were to give a seminar to the class on a topic of our choosing. The idea was to gauge which area of physics we would be interested in following professionally.
Professor Gilson Carneiro knew I was interested in cosmology and suggested a book by Nobel Prize Laureate Steven Weinberg: The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. I still have my original copy in Portuguese, from 1979, that emanates a musty tropical smell, sitting on my bookshelf side-by-side with the American version, a Bantam edition from 1979.
Inspired by Steven Weinberg
Books can change lives. They can illuminate the path ahead. In my case, there is no question that Weinberg's book blew my teenage mind. I decided, then and there, that I would become a cosmologist working on the physics of the early universe. The first three minutes of cosmic existence — what could be more exciting for a young physicist than trying to uncover the mystery of creation itself and the origin of the universe, matter, and stars? Weinberg quickly became my modern physics hero, the one I wanted to emulate professionally. Sadly, he passed away July 23rd, leaving a huge void for a generation of physicists.
What excited my young imagination was that science could actually make sense of the very early universe, meaning that theories could be validated and ideas could be tested against real data. Cosmology, as a science, only really took off after Einstein published his paper on the shape of the universe in 1917, two years after his groundbreaking paper on the theory of general relativity, the one explaining how we can interpret gravity as the curvature of spacetime. Matter doesn't "bend" time, but it affects how quickly it flows. (See last week's essay on what happens when you fall into a black hole).
The Big Bang Theory
For most of the 20th century, cosmology lived in the realm of theoretical speculation. One model proposed that the universe started from a small, hot, dense plasma billions of years ago and has been expanding ever since — the Big Bang model; another suggested that the cosmos stands still and that the changes astronomers see are mostly local — the steady state model.
Competing models are essential to science but so is data to help us discriminate among them. In the mid 1960s, a decisive discovery changed the game forever. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), a fossil from the early universe predicted to exist by George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman in their Big Bang model. (Alpher and Herman published a lovely account of the history here.) The CMB is a bath of microwave photons that permeates the whole of space, a remnant from the epoch when the first hydrogen atoms were forged, some 400,000 years after the bang.
The existence of the CMB was the smoking gun confirming the Big Bang model. From that moment on, a series of spectacular observatories and detectors, both on land and in space, have extracted huge amounts of information from the properties of the CMB, a bit like paleontologists that excavate the remains of dinosaurs and dig for more bones to get details of a past long gone.
How far back can we go?
Confirming the general outline of the Big Bang model changed our cosmic view. The universe, like you and me, has a history, a past waiting to be explored. How far back in time could we dig? Was there some ultimate wall we cannot pass?
Because matter gets hot as it gets squeezed, going back in time meant looking at matter and radiation at higher and higher temperatures. There is a simple relation that connects the age of the universe and its temperature, measured in terms of the temperature of photons (the particles of visible light and other forms of invisible radiation). The fun thing is that matter breaks down as the temperature increases. So, going back in time means looking at matter at more and more primitive states of organization. After the CMB formed 400,000 years after the bang, there were hydrogen atoms. Before, there weren't. The universe was filled with a primordial soup of particles: protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, and neutrinos, the ghostly particles that cross planets and people unscathed. Also, there were very light atomic nuclei, such as deuterium and tritium (both heavier cousins of hydrogen), helium, and lithium.
Cosmic alchemy
So, to study the universe after 400,000 years, we need to use atomic physics, at least until large clumps of matter aggregate due to gravity and start to collapse to form the first stars, a few millions of years after. What about earlier on? The cosmic history is broken down into chunks of time, each the realm of different kinds of physics. Before atoms form, all the way to about a second after the Big Bang, it's nuclear physics time. That's why Weinberg brilliantly titled his book The First Three Minutes. It is during the interval between one-hundredth of a second and three minutes that the light atomic nuclei (made of protons and neutrons) formed, a process called, with poetic flair, primordial nucleosynthesis. Protons collided with neutrons and, sometimes, stuck together due to the attractive strong nuclear force. Why did only a few light nuclei form then? Because the expansion of the universe made it hard for the particles to find each other.
What about the nuclei of heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen, calcium, gold? The answer is beautiful: all the elements of the periodic table after lithium were made and continue to be made in stars, the true cosmic alchemists. Hydrogen eventually becomes people if you wait long enough. At least in this universe.
In this article, we got all the way up to nucleosynthesis, the forging of the first atomic nuclei when the universe was a minute old. What about earlier on? How close to the beginning, to t = 0, can science get? Stay tuned, and we will continue next week.
To Steven Weinberg, with gratitude, for all that you taught us about the universe.
