Mathematics and Science in Arcadia

Chaos Theory:

• Energy has dissipated so you can't rewind time
• Difficult to put everything back together
• Patterns and links - just like in the play where there are links between the present and past, eg the deja vu of Bernard emulating Lord Byron's behaviour
• Difficult to find a start, only obscure patterns
• Can't account for the infinite number of variables - confusing
• It's as much about what we don't know as what we know
• The enlightenment thought that one has to be able to explain everything easily and rationally - replaced by romanticism - emotion and knowledge are intertwined

Valentine: 'It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.'

Chaos Theory and the Structure of the Whole Play:

• Lots of 'noise' to be cleared away so that Hannah, Bernard and the audience can discover what really happened
• Similar things happen in each time period - life follows patterns
• Peices come apart and then come back together wrong
• Characters misinterpret historical data
• Lots of information but do we really get answers or not
• Lack of linear time
• Newtonian physics = classicism   being ousted by...
• Picturesque = chaos theory

Newtonian Physics vs Chaos Theory:

• Newton invented rules for physics
• You can never measure things exactly
• Newtonian physics isn't wrong it just relates to the first model of the universe
• No theory works in every circumstance
• Septimus is talking from a belief in Newtonian physics - Nothing is ever lost
• When he loses Thomasina he sees that this isn't true/wants to make her famous by proving her theorem
• Everything is interlinked but things are random
• Classical gardening is more order compared to picturesque landscape and chaos theory - questioning old simple rules
• Valentine loves chaos theory

Septimus 'We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?'

Entropy in the play:

• Entropy in increasing in the universe/increasing the chaos (the entropy increases in a closed system or usable, ordered energy is dissipating) - amount of props on the shared table is always increasing
• Impossible to recover initial conditions - trying to figure out what happened in past, and how they will evolve in the future

The Coverly Set:

• Valentine finally completes Thomasina's algorithm
• Thomasina was on the cusp of discovery but because she only has a pencil and paper she can't get that far
• Time periods merge to work together

Determinism states that everything happens because the conditions are such that nothing else could happen

Chloe: 'The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.'