I’ve had the good fortune to see Arcadia three times – at the St Louis Repertory Theater in 1997, at the Folger Theater in Washington DC in 2009, and its first revival on Broadway in 2011. It has since been revived in a popular production at London’s Old Vic. Arcadia is easily my favourite play of modern times. I hope to see it again.

What makes Arcadia special?

There’s nothing quite like it, just like there was nothing like Tom Stoppard for wordplay, ingenuity and serious intellectual themes. Set in a single room of an English country house, Arcadia alternates between 1809 and the present day. In the action from the past, a brilliant young student and her tutor explore mathematics, Shakespeare and desire amid dangerous but mostly comic liaisons; in the present, two rival academics try to reconstruct what happened at this English country house and why what happened continues to matter.

Arcadia is laugh-out-loud funny at times. The alternation of past and present is ingenious because, having seen the scenes from the past, we know things the characters in the present can only guess at, often incorrectly. The plotting is complex but rewarding. The plot twist at the end, and the final scene, break your heart in a way few plays can. Along the way, Stoppard provides some serious food for thought, which is no small feat for a work of art this entertaining.

Underlying the action of the play is a conversation about the relative merits of the humanities vs. science. In 1809, the poet Lord Byron (who gets mentioned a number of times in the play), is a celebrity equivalent to a rock star today. By modern times, it is the scientists and the tech wizards who get all the glory. Poets? Not so much. As Bernard Nightingale (one of the modern-day English professors) complains: ‘How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?’

Stoppard seems to put his thumb on the scale a bit – Bernard, who gets the most airtime on behalf of the humanities, is not an easy character to like. His pomposity, his lack of interest in the truth, his willingness to massage the facts to fit his self-serving theories, and his condescending and distasteful behaviour toward women all predispose us to root against him. And his attempts to unravel what role if any, Byron played in this English country house seems to represent the worst of modern academic life.

Representing the reliably certain sciences, you have the tutor Septimus (who studied mathematics at Cambridge), Valentine (one of the modern family members aspiring to discover the secrets of population growth using the gamebooks of his family’s estate), and Thomasina, who, though just on the cusp of adulthood, is a hidden mathematical prodigy. All three of these characters, but especially Septimus and Thomasina, attract us. But Stoppard is a playwright and not a physicist. So despite Bernard’s shortcomings, he (and Stoppard) get something like the last word in the debate.

Consider this glorious description of the human pursuit of knowledge from the tutor Septimus. He seems to emphasise the inevitability of human progress in both the humanities and science:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Gorgeous. But I’d say Septimus is only half-right. Technological progress – represented here by the corkscrew – does indeed have an inevitability about it. Great scientists and inventors advance knowledge and often make life easier for their fellow human beings marching alongside them and those that will arrive in the future. But almost always, Septimus suggests, the most you can say about a particular scientist is that they sped up the rate of progress. Had that innovator never lived, the technology or mathematics or science would be discovered eventually by someone else. Having central heating beats not having it. Having it sooner than later is a blessing. But there is an inevitability about its arrival. It may be delayed. But human beings will figure it out. For many secular moderns, the relentless progress in science and technology is their version of messianism – the redemption of the world is inevitable as knowledge grows until everything is discovered and no mysteries remain.

Septimus is right about science, mathematics and medicine: lost discoveries are not tragedies. Nothing is lost on the march. Stoppard makes us feel this vividly with the story of Thomasina. She discovers fractals and the power of algorithmic iteration. But her discoveries never see the light of day. No worries. It’s only a delay – Mandelbrot and others will come along in 150 years or so. Nothing is lost on the march.

But if this is so, why does the loss of Thomasina’s insights break our hearts? The answer has nothing to do with the world having to wait 150 years to discover what Thomasina figured out. It is the human part of the tragedy. It is the sadness at the lost joy because her gifts never materialise, that she never knows the satisfaction of the role she might have played in the march of humanity towards a deeper understanding of our physical world. We human beings care about more than the scorecard of what we have discovered and what remains unknown. We care about more than our mastery of the physical world.

And that’s why, toward the end of the play, Bernard’s reply to Valentine (who doesn’t respect the humanities or Bernard) hits so hard:

If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.’

And this is the sense in which Stoppard gets the last word. Self-knowledge takes a lifetime and even then it’s incomplete. Stoppard’s play doesn’t yield a better gadget or a better corkscrew; it achieves something even more impressive: it helps us understand ourselves. How can a play about a fictional mathematician make us weep? How can an ass of a fictional English professor quote a real-life poet and get us to realise that a single lost play of Sophocles or Shakespeare or even Stoppard is a loss that can never be regained? And Byron’s description of a beautiful woman making her way through the world is a mysterious evocation of beauty. It’s unique. It stabs you and its unscientific imprecision is part of its power. This, too, is central to what we experience on the march.

Perhaps Stoppard (via Septimus) is also saying that while the lost plays of Sophocles can no longer be read or performed, their insights about the human condition can be made our own, ‘piece by piece’ through other works of art. Perhaps. But that fundamental mystery of who we are – a crooked timber that we struggle to straighten – does not abate with algorithms, or mathematics, or the latest scientific discovery. It’s woven of a different cloth, it is what we all yearn to wear while we are on the march, and it requires a Stoppard to give us a chance, through his art, to advance our self-understanding, to craft it, piece by piece.

Russ Roberts hosts the weekly podcast, EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious.