CHLOË: “Byron Fought Fatal Duel, Syas Don” … Valentine, do you think I’m the first person to think of this?

VALENTINE: No.

CHLOË: I haven’t said yet. The future is all programmed like a computer — that’s a proper theory, isn’t it?

VALENTINE: The deterministic universe, yes.

CHLOË: Right. Because everything including us is just a lot of atoms bouncing off each other like billiard balls.

VALENTINE: Yes. There was someone, forget his name, 1820s, who pointed out that from Newton’s laws you could predict everything to come — I mean, you’d need a computer as big as the universe but the formula would exist.

CHLOË: But it doesn’t work, does it?

VALENTINE: No. It turns out the maths is different.

CHLOË: No, it’s all because of sex.

(p. 73)

Absent from Arcadia’s list of characters is that of mathematics and science. The implications of the second law of thermodynamics — that disorder will increase until all energy is dissipated and all light and life are extinguished — factor heavily in the development of the play. Like an unseen figure, mathematics lingers between the characters’ exchanges and attempts to complete an understanding of human interaction as though it may be explained by a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. The elusive proof remains as unattainable as a proof of an equation to represent the variables in human attraction or love. The exchange here between Chloë and Valentine from Act two, scene seven reveals how mathematic curiosity draws Stoppard’s characters towards that human equation that can never be solved and, like that “attraction that Newton left out,” to each other as love intercedes between mirrored characters separated by time, but not by emotion (74).

When Chloë asks Valentine, “do you think I’m the first person to think of this?” she becomes a parallel figure to Thomasina Coverly who asks her tutor, Septimus Hodge, the same probing question on page five. Valentine, the Oxford Don, likewise assumes Hodge’s role. The Chloë-Thomasina/Hodge-Valentine pairings demonstrate the timelessness of intellect and sex. Chloë and Thomasina arrive at similar thoughts and feelings. Both appear on the edge of making sense of the chaos in nature but are also absorbed by the chaos of falling in love. Chloë’s statement “Because everything including us is just a lot of atoms bouncing off each other like billiard balls” shows that she connects Chaos theory to describe the natural world in a deterministic system to the same chaotic happenings when a person becomes attracted to another. She includes “us” in the equation. Chaos is apparently unpredictable behavior which arises in a deterministic system because of great sensitivity to initial conditions. Chaos arises in a dynamical system if two arbitrarily close starting points diverge exponentially, so that their future behavior is eventually unpredictable. The connection Arcadia attempts to forge is that if there is chaos in nature then there must also be chaos in human nature. That an explanation of chaos cannot be neatly packaged in a formula, or rather, that an explanation of why people act, feel, and love the way they do cannot be logically mapped propels Septimus Hodge into insanity.

While Thomasina, Hodge, Chloë, Valentine, and Hannah Jarvis are drawn to each other like two bodies acted upon by gravity, the plot of Arcadia is driven by a quest of discovery. Both Valentine and Jarvis look to solve a mystery in Sidley Park — if Lord Byron was involved in a duel which caused him to leave England and the identity of the Sidley Park hermit. Ironically, they are looking for the same individual in Septimus Hodge. Hodge explores the unpredictability of passion, the clash of rationality and emotion, the way that chaos can emerge from logic; his fate to be driven insane by what Thomasina foresaw — that the second law of thermodynamics ensures the world will become more and more incoherent and disorganized.

Thomasina’s is to explain the reteratio His purpose is to explore the unpredictability of passion, the clash of rationality and emotion, the way that chaos can emerge from logic; and he shows how certain mathematical ideas reflect and resonate with these themes.

ominous implications of the second law of thermodynamics—that disorder will increase until all energy is dissipated and all light and life are extinguished—hang heavy over the play

And this leads to one of the central questions of the play: How far can science and mathematics take us in explaining what life is all about? Septimus’s fate was to be driven insane by what Thomasina foresaw—that the second law of thermodynamics insures the world will become more and more incoherent and disorganized. Her understanding that algebra was inadequate to describe nature tormented him to the end of his days. Hannah reads from an old letter describing Septimus’s life as a hermit: “[I]t was Frenchified mathematick that brought him to the melancholy certitude of a world without light or life … as a wooden stove that must consume itself until ash and stove are as one, and heat is gone from the earth.” Septimus died laboring `for the restitution of hope through good English algebra.” Arcadia presents a spellbinding picture of what can happen when people really, really care about what science and mathematics have to say.

At the end of the play, the 1990s characters change into old-fashioned dress in preparation for a dance being held at Sidley Park. And then at one point, as Hannah and Valentine sit reading, Thomasina and her brother suddenly fly into the room, two kids teasing each other. Characters from both eras, who had been separate in previous scenes, suddenly appear onstage together. The effect is magical, reinforcing the sense that although the world is unpredictable, patterns emerge and re-emerge as time marches on. A moment later, Valentine and Septimus are, in their separate times, examining Thomasina’s crude drawing of a heat engine, solid proof that she had anticipated the second law of thermodynamics. Like a ball breaking a pane of glass, says Valentine, “You can put back the bits of glass, but you can’t collect up the heat of the smash. So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold,” Septimus echoes.

Chaos is apparently unpredictable behavior arising in a deterministic system because of great sensitivity to initial conditions. Chaos arises in a dynamical system if two arbitrarily close starting points diverge exponential- ly, so that their future behavior is eventually unpredictable.

chaos in nature/human nature