      |
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Central
to the pattern of Arcadia’s story is the idea of the classical understanding
and style giving way to newer, more complicated approaches and concepts.
The new ideas seem to the characters—and often to us as well—less
structured or even totally without rhyme or reason. As Valentine explains,
however, there is structure even in chaos.
Classical
Idea: A standard, parabolic
curve from Euclidian geometry.
|
Contemporary
Idea: Bransley’s Fern, a
famous example of iterative fractal geometry.
|
Classical
Idea: An English garden, how the Croom estate might have
appeared before Noakes re-landscaped it—“perfected
nature”—natural elements arranged to form a picture.
|
Gothic
Idea: A Gothic garden painted by Salvator Rosa, an inspiration
for the picturesque style of landscape gardening.
|
Classical
Idea: Gallilean physics demonstrating predictable, elliptical
orbits
and the associated forces.
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Modern
Idea: Satellite image of naturally occurring cloud turbulence,
a complex pattern that is explained by chaos theory and modeled
by fractal geometry.
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