Arcadia, written in 1993 by Tom Stoppard, is concerned with the relationship between order and disorder, past and present, and certainty and uncertainty. The action is divided between two timelines set in one room in an English mansion, Sidley Park, almost two hundred years apart. The first account depicts the brilliant daughter of the estate, Thomasina Coverly, who was mentored by Septimus Hodge in 1809. While in 1933, researchers Hannah Jarvis, Bernard Lightingale and Valentine Coverly attempted to piece together the history of the estate from the annotations by Thomasina. . Stoppard alternates between these two stories as well as two chronologies. This non-linear narrative covers a wide range of scientific topics, including thermodynamics, fractals, and chaos theory. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay First of all, I consider mathematics and science to play a fundamental role in Arcadia. Stoppard takes contemporary science as his subject. This can be seen in the fact that the characters' lives revolve around science. For example, Thomasina's scientific curiosity is illustrated in scene 1. Even while eating her rice pudding, she tries to find scientific explanations for the world around her. In fact, something similar happens to Valentine when he wonders where the cream disappears once added to a cup of coffee, claiming that it is "(…) as mysterious to us as the sky was to the Greeks » (Scene 4). Furthermore, the aforementioned paradoxes of the play manifest through the discourse of Science. Additionally, greater truths about humanity and social issues in general are revealed through the study of different theorems. The relationship between human situations and scientific principles can be easily seen throughout the play. Arcadia certainly references many scientific principles through the metaphorical use of science and mathematics. Three metaphorical threads can be followed in the piece: “the action of bodies in heat”, which refers to thermodynamics; the unpredictable and the predetermined, which refer to chaos theory, as well as plotting and iteration, which are also linked to chaos and mathematics. These ideas are explored by many characters, notably Thomasina, and they all relate to the description of disorder and irregularity in systems. Thomasina's first discovery, the second law of thermodynamics, is glimpsed in scene 1 and confirmed in scene 7. In short, this law states that the energy of the universe gradually evolves toward disorder. Additionally, this law imposes a direction on time: while all other physical laws would work the same whether time moves forward or backward, this is not true for the second law of thermodynamics. Thomasina emphasizes this when she states that Newton's equations can move forward or backward, but the "heat equation" can only go in one direction. She manages to explain thermodynamics in familiar terms, stating that "you can't make things happen", which reinforces the idea that science plays a major role in the daily lives of the characters. This seems to be the strength of Thomasina's scientific thinking: she can think about complex ideas in familiar terms. Additionally, there is a hidden metaphor in Thomasina's discovery. When she confirms her intuition about the second law of thermodynamics in scene 7, her wording is ambiguous. When her mother asks her what she is studying, she describes it as "the action of bodies in heat",while she read an essay referring to the same phenomenon as the “propagation of heat in a solid body”. Thomasina's words are not naive, as she noticed that Lady Croom passionately played the piano with Count Zelinsky. Once again, this shows the extent to which Science is used metaphorically to refer to human situations. On the other hand, increasing disorder is also embodied by the garden, which loses its order because of Mr. Noakes's work. Apart from this, the second law of thermodynamics is at work throughout the play, causing degradation rather than progression: Thomasina is going to die and researchers are having difficulty finding information. Arcadia demonstrates this law in relation to time; Stoppard alternates two periods in a way that defies physics. There is an initial order between scenes, until the last scene in which both periods are shown simultaneously. The room itself is governed by this law, it acts like a “body in heat”. Another metaphorical thread of Arcadia can be seen through Valentine's ambiguous speech during her investigation into chaos theory. This theory is a branch of mathematics focused on the behavior of dynamic systems that are very sensitive to initial conditions. In his speech, Valentine emphasizes that theories only describe “the very large and the very small” (scene 4). As far as I am concerned, Valentine suggests that human situations, even the fate of the characters in the play, are also linked to mathematics and theorems. It implicitly says that even the most insignificant things can have a big impact. Similarly, Chloe manages to relate science to ordinary human situations in scene 7. Here she expresses that people can crave people they are not supposed to like, which breaks Newton's concept. law. Newton's laws and the laws of gravity supported the idea that the universe worked like a clock and that everything that happened on Earth or in the solar system could be predicted and explained. Newton's explanation of the universe adheres to determinism, which can be briefly described as the belief that all events, including thought, are caused by prior circumstances and that people have no real ability to make decisions. choice or to control what happens. However, Stoppard manages to confront Newton's theory through Chloe's ideas and to connect physics to human feelings. Finally, the final interesting metaphorical thread here refers to the relationship between plot and iteration and the structure of the play. In mathematics, the action of tracing is a translation of written symbols into a visual representation: once traced, an equation becomes a graph. When Thomasina announces that she is going to “trace this sheet and deduce its equation” in scene 3, she reverses this process. In my opinion, this concept relates to the way Stoppard wrote the play, alternating between two narratives, coming and going in a non-linear fashion. On the one hand, Arcadia's plot addresses ideas like disorder or chaotic behavior. On the other hand, these ideas provide us with models through which we can interpret the piece. Iteration in mathematics refers to the process of iterating a function, that is, applying a function repeatedly, using the result of one iteration as the input to the next. This question is explored by Valentine and Hannah, and I think the ambiguity regarding this topic lies in the fact that Arcadia has a series of recurring topics revolving primarily around sex, literature, science, and gardening. Not only are the characters firmly tied to science, but the underlying structure of the