ABSTRACT
The 1920s witnessed further significant developments in human intellectual and practical life across Europe and America. Art deco replaced art nouveau as the dominant style in the high arts, as symbolised by the opalescent glass of Rene Lalique, the chryselephantine sculptures of Demetre Chiparus and the striking macassar ebony and walnut used in the manufacture of much new furniture. In the world of haute couture Coco Chanel set the roaring twenties alight (at least in Paris) with her trendsetting ‘little black dress’. In the scientific world Werner Heisenberg exploded what remained of mechanistic Newtonian physics in 1926 with his uncertainty principle, proving that both the precise position and momentum of a sub-atomic particle could not simultaneously be known; quantum mechanics proper was duly born. In philosophy Ludwig Wittgenstein published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus first in German in 1921 and in English a year later, in which the existent world was defined simply as everything that was the case.
