1925
Heisenberg founds quantum mechanics
On a hayfever retreat to the North Sea island of Heligoland, Werner Heisenberg worked out the mathematics of atomic behavior as arrays of numbers. Born and Jordan soon recognized these as matrices. Within eighteen months Schrodinger had his wave equation. Physics had a new fundamental theory, and it was impossibly strange.
Hubble shows the universe is expanding
Using the hundred-inch telescope at Mount Wilson, Edwin Hubble proved that Andromeda was a separate galaxy outside the Milky Way, not a nebula inside it. The universe was vastly larger than astronomers had thought, and full of other galaxies. A few years later Hubble would show it was also expanding in every direction.
Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald's slim novel of Long Island parties, bootleggers, and unreachable love sold poorly and seemed destined for forgotten shelves. Its author died fifteen years later thinking himself a failure. The book found its readers after his death and became, for generations, the American novel about wanting and not getting.
Scopes Monkey Trial
In Dayton, Tennessee, a young biology teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution. William Jennings Bryan argued for the literal Bible. Clarence Darrow put Bryan himself on the stand and made him look a fool about Jonah and the whale. Scopes was fined a hundred dollars. American culture had found a permanent battlefield.
Surrealist Manifesto
Andre Breton's group in Paris published a statement announcing a new movement that would free the imagination from the logic of waking life by drawing on dreams and the unconscious. Dali, Magritte, Ernst, and Bunuel all found in it a permission slip. Surrealism became one of the century's most recognizable artistic brands.
Great Gatsby published
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel of Long Island bootleggers and unattainable love sold about twenty thousand copies in its first year, leaving its author bitter and broke. After his death the slim green-dust-jacketed book was rediscovered and became, in the second half of the century, something close to the American novel.