The modern trend of time: Prigogine and Stengers on scientific progress in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

In this article I discuss Tom Stoppard’s reading of Order out of Chaos by Prigogine and Stengers. This influence, which has not previously been explored in scholarship, provided Stoppard with an insight into Prigogine and Stengers’ view on scientific innovation and chaos theory, which is developed in his play Arcadia. Their reading of chaos theory in nature, as a methodology that drove scientific progress, was thus important in the creation of Arcadia. A defining property of chaos theory, the butterfly effect, or sensitive dependence to initial conditions, is embedded within the play as a subtle metaphor. The unravelling of metaphors stems from the play’s process of creation and its representation of bodies on stage. Stoppard, by echoing Prigogine and Stengers, implies that meaningful knowledge will endure over time. Intuition and factual knowledge are reconciled through the work’s engagement with its cultural context.