Topic > The relationship between science and love in Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia"

Tom Stoppard is famous for the wit and intellectual charm of his creations, and Arcadia fulfills these characteristics perfectly. Stoppard has the ability to exquisitely present the simplest but most important things in life. The work is uniquely structured, using complex mathematical theorems and numerous historical references that reveal myriad themes, juxtaposing the past with the present, the classical with the romantic, and mathematics with poetics. All this is done to demonstrate one of the most basic human truths: that – despite all logic – the human being cannot live fully without love. This essay aims to explain the relationship between the mathematical aspects of the play and the way in which love is represented. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Mathematics and science play a starring role in Arcadia. The work not only features mathematicians as central characters, but also uses mathematics and science to bring magnificence and magic to everyday things – clouds, a leaf, a population of birds. Mathematics is far from just a collection of simplistic calculation rules; can provide extremely rich descriptions of our complex world and ourselves. The purpose of using, for example, the second law of thermodynamics, is not to fully understand it, but to see how it helps to understand the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty, and the absolute uncertainty of love. is fitting for a play set partly at the dawn of the 19th century, when the Enlightenment was giving way to the Romantic era, it is also about sex, love, jealousy and other confusing human emotions that cannot, presumably, be clearly described. reduced to a mathematical formula. Whenever the characters try to fix and understand reality, whether through the use of language, through the use of narratives designed to control and explain their experiences, or through the study of science, they discover that life is not like that easily confined and defined. Consequently, the work raises the question of how much love, life, mathematics and science can be related and how far the latter can take us in explaining what life and love are. In the Arcadian universe, the common notion that love and science occupy opposite poles and the human experience is turned on its head. Rational, logical science and irrational, passionate love have something in common: both are unpredictable and chaotic. The mix of mathematical theorems with love and history may seem strange at first glance. Stoppard explained that his inspiration for Arcadia came from reading the mathematical theory novel "Chaos" and at the same time exploring the style, temperament and art of Romanticism and Classicism and in particular the differences in these styles . Throughout the novel, the dominant theory is, in fact, the theory of “chaos”. The nature of knowledge, whether mathematical, physical or historical, is chaotic. The play itself, as Stoppard says, is "constructed in chaos" (Demastes and Kelly, 1994:5), with a couple of bifurcations and finally arriving at the last scene, which is extremely confusing. ideas in the action of the work demolish the idea that he only used chaos theory as a way to strengthen his work, since it was the scientific theory in vogue at the time. Instead, its aim is to explore – using this theory – the clash between rationality and emotion, the unpredictability of passion, and how chaos can develop from logic. Show how some mathematical ideas and theories reflect and resonate with these themes. Science has long been theprimary way in which humans have attempted to understand the world around them. In the opening scene, Thomasina takes a look at Newtonian science and Euclidean geometry, modes of thought that see the world as linear, ordered, and stable. In human terms, Newton and his classical laws of motion appear to leave no room for unpredictability and free will. Thomasina explains the consequences of what would happen if everything behaved according to Newton's laws of motion starting from the supposed situation that if all the atoms stopped, someone really intelligent could write the formula for all the future. This apparent causal determinism suggests a deterministic and mechanical universe; it is strict order, regularity and predictability. However, Thomasina has already begun to sense that this view of the universe is incomplete and tells Septimus about how stirring the rice pudding backwards will not make the jam go back together. This seemingly simple observation points to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the increasing disorder in the universe. This disorder is not seen entirely as something bad, and Valentine and Hannah even seem to celebrate the fact that those previously mentioned scientists were wrong, because it opens so many doorways of possibilities, creates so many mysteries; they celebrate uncertainty. Indeed, the work as a whole acknowledges the difficulty of truly knowing anything. In its depiction of people struggling to understand the past and to find the keys that unlock the mysteries of nature, the work is a celebration of the human struggle to gain knowledge, to understand as much as possible. Rather than despair, Stoppard embraces cautious optimism and expresses a resounding faith in human action rather than a materialistic view of life. Arcadia is a confirmation that, despite all the indeterminacy, people can use their intellect and intuition to gain knowledge and understand their surroundings. This suggests that science often works and that people can lead fulfilling lives. Even without all the answers, people can be happy, and engaging with uncertainty is part of what makes human life worth living. The line, in the first scene, that sexual attraction is the attraction that Newton left out is one of Stoppard's metaphorical concepts for the difficulty in charting individual destinies. Newton's laws work when they operate in a vacuum, and it is the friction of the real world that destroys predictability. Likewise, the multiple variables and contingencies of reality, which include love and the heat of sexual passion, preclude predictable and deterministic lives. The richness of deterministic chaos as a metaphor for human life and interactions is its paradoxical quality. The sense of determinism, of the inability to control who one falls in love with is present, but the work also shows free will in action as Septimus decides not to consummate the relationship with his pupil. In Arcadia, characters experience both determinism and unpredictability, both fate and free will. Hannah is a character whose dominant personality is "scientific" in that she loves impartial intellect. He claims that the Romantic movement was a “fiction” and that the orderly, classical gardens that were replaced represented paradise. Hanna puts thought before emotion, classic over romantic, and sees the world in binary terms. He sees emotion as an unwanted irregularity, a potential collapse into disorder. Ironically, to prove his point that the Age of Enlightenment was relegated to the wilderness of Romanticism, he must rely on instinct and intuition. To sum up, it embodies Tom Stoppard's idea.