Themes Arcadia explores the nature of evidence and truth in the context of modern ideas about history, mathematics, and physics. It shows how clues left by the past are interpreted in the present, by both laypeople and scholars. Stoppard has said that his initial inspiration came from reading James Gleick's 1987 bestseller, Chaos: Making a New Science, "which is about this new kind of mathematics. That sounds fairly daunting if one's talking about a play. I thought, here is a marvellous metaphor." Besides chaos, the play attends to a wide array of subjects, including thermodynamics, computer algorithms, fractals, population dynamics, determinism (especially in the context of love and death), classics, landscape design, Romanticism vs. Classicism, English literature (particularly poetry), Byron, 18th century periodicals, modern academia, and even South Pacific botany. These are all concrete topics of conversation; their more abstract resonances rise into epistemology, nihilism, and the origins of lust and madness.
Themes Arcadia explores the nature of evidence and truth in the context of modern ideas about history, mathematics, and physics. It shows how clues left by the past are interpreted in the present, by both laypeople and scholars. Stoppard has said that his initial inspiration came from reading James Gleick's 1987 bestseller, Chaos: Making a New Science, "which is about this new kind of mathematics. That sounds fairly daunting if one's talking about a play. I thought, here is a marvellous metaphor" Besides chaos, the play attends to a wide array of subjects, including thermodynamics, computer algorithms, fractals, population dynamics, determinism (especially in the context of love and death), classics landscape design, Romanticism vs. Classicism, English literature (particularly poetry), Byron, 18th century periodicals, modern academia, and even South Pacific botany These are all concrete topics of conversation; their more abstract resonances rise into epistemology, nihilism, and the origins of lust and madness.