# Arcadia **Tom Stoppard** | 1993 | Play > *"It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."* --- A play in two acts, set in the same room 180 years apart. Sidley Park, Derbyshire. 1809 and the present day. Chaos theory, Romanticism, landscape gardening, thermodynamics, literary detective work, and the nature of knowledge itself. The scenes alternate between centuries but the questions rhyme: What can we know? What survives? Does the truth of the past matter if we can never fully recover it? --- ## Currently Tracking - The garden as metaphor (classical order vs. romantic wilderness) - Thomasina's discovery and what it means that she found it first - The researchers in the present: certainty built on incomplete evidence - Heat death, entropy, and Stoppard's use of the second law --- *Notes and highlights in progress.*