by
STEVEN SAVITT
Department of Philosophy
University of British Columbia
IT MIGHT SEEM OMINOUS that the program
of a play contains essays explaining
the esoteric bits. Relax. Arcadia is
neither a lecture nor a sermon. It's
a witty, charming,
and moving play about sex and literature— or maybe order and disorder—or
is it truth and time? Tom Stoppard
does, however, weave a number of ideas
from physics and philosophy into both
the thinking of his characters and
the structure
of the play, and we can enhance our
appreciation of this dazzling tapestry
by unweaving a few of these strands.
Let's look at some of the ways the
notion of time appears in this play
and so, inevitably,
we begin with the physics of Sir Isaac
Newton.
At the end of the seventeenth
century Newton brought together in
one grand synthesis the laws governing
the motions
of the planets discovered by Kepler
and the laws governing the motions
of projectiles on the surface of
the Earth discovered by Galileo. Aristotle
had thought of the heavenly and the
earthly as two separate realms, with
the order of the motions of the heavenly
bodies contrasting
with the disorder we see around us.
Newton produced one simple set of
mathematical
laws that seemed to account for all.
The Newtonian laws have two
features that reverberate throughout
the play. First, these laws seem
to be deterministic. If you know, for
example, the state of the sun,
moon,
and earth at some given time, you
can predict when future eclipses will
occur.
Given the present state of the
system, the occurrence (or non-occurrence)
of an eclipse at some given future
time is fixed—fixed by the present
state of the system and the laws that
govern its evolution. If the Newtonian
laws are basic and universal, then
all the future is fixed, as Thomasina
(later echoed by Chloë and Valentine)
says:
If you could stop every atom
in its position and direction,
and if your mind could comprehend all
the
actions thus suspended, then
if you were really, really good at
algebra
you could write the formula for
all the future; and although nobody
can
be so clever as to do it, the
formula must exist just as if one could.
Second,
one can not only predict when
eclipses will occur, but, using Newton's
equations,
one can also “retrodict” when
in the past eclipses must have occurred.
As Thomasina remarks, Will the Heat
All Go into the Mix?Newcomen's Atmospheric
Steam Engine.From the 1832 Edinburgh
Encyclopaedia.Steven SavittDepartment
of Philosophy The University of British
Columbia “Newton's equations
go backwards and forward, they do not
care which way.” The equations
are said to be time symmetric or time-reversal
invariant. If you watch a film of one
billiard ball striking another, it
will make no difference, you will not
be able to tell, whether the projector
is being run forwards or in reverse.
Not so, if you were to watch a film
of jam being stirred into
rice pudding. As Thomasina says to
her tutor:
When
you stir your rice pudding, Septimus,
the spoonful of jam spreads itself
round making red trails like the
picture of a meteor in my astronomical
atlas.
But if you stir backward, the jam
will not come together again. Indeed,
the
pudding does not notice and continues
to turn pink, just as before. Do
you think this is odd?
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Septimus
says “no” (though one takes
what he says at face value at one's
peril), but reflective individuals
have for long been puzzled by the mismatch
between the time symmetry of the basic
laws of physics and the time asymmetry
of experience. Valentine raises the
same problem. “Your tea gets
cold by itself, it doesn't get hot
by itself.” We grow older, not
younger. Causes work to the future,
but not to the past. We know much more
about yesterday than we do about tomorrow.
Indeed, we have records of the past
but not of the future, like the game
books and letters that fuel the theories
of Bernard and Hannah. If we do have
something like records of the future,
they, like the artifacts from the present
day action of the play that sit on
the table invisible to Thomasina and
Septimus, are equally invisible to
us.
Valentine
continues the thought above by saying
to Hannah, “It'll take a while
but we're all going to end up at room
temperature. When your hermit set up
shop nobody understood this.” “This” is
the second law of thermodynamics, the
first apparently basic time asymmetric
law in physics, derived from reflection
on devices like the noisy Improved
Newcomen Steam Pump that we hear in
the distance. Thomasina says that the
pump “repays eleven pence in
the shilling at most.” The second
law appeared in roughly this form in
a short book by a French engineer Sadi
Carnot, Reflections
on the Motive Power of Fire,
in 1824. The second law of thermodynamics
in general says that entropy, a quantity
that may be thought of as disorder
or the inability of energy to do
work, increases in all but some very
special
physical processes. A modern, and
highly relevant, form of this law
is that,
through time and on the whole, information
always decreases (like the burning
of Byron's letter or the inability
of Bernard and Hannah to get the
story of Sidley park in April, 1809,
quite
right).
Must
we then reach a time when there is
no more usable energy, when the heat
has gone entirely into the mix, when
the Improved Newtonian Universe must
cease and grow cold? Are we, as Septimus
says, “all doomed”? When
Thomasina laments the loss of the library
of Alexandria, Septimus replies that
nothing is ever really lost. “The
missing plays of Sophocles will turn
up piece by piece, or be written again
in another language.” In a structural
parallel, ideas and bits of dialogue
from the early story turn up or recur
in the modern episode. These two ideas,
loss and recurrence, which echo in
the contrasts of fate with free will
and Romantic pessimism with Enlightenment
optimism, are left in perfect counterpoise
at the end of the play with Hannah
and Gus celebrating the discovery of
the true identity of the Hermit of
Sidley Park while, in a fusion of the
two times, Septimus dances with Thomasina
shortly before the loss of her nascent
genius.
Steven
Savitt is Professor of Philosophy at
the University of British Columbia.
His general interests are in philosophy
of science and metaphysics. |
