Arcadia Science Quotes Page 2
Citations follow this format: (Act.Scene)
| Quote #4 Valentine: It's how you look at population changes in biology. Goldfish in a pond, say. This year there are x goldfish. Next year there'll be y goldfish. Some get born, some get eaten by herons, whatever. Nature manipulates the x and turns it into y. Then y goldfish is your starting population for the following year. [...] Your value for y becomes your next value for x. The question is: what is being done to x? What is the manipulation? Whatever it is, it can be written down as mathematics. It's called an algorithm. (1.4) |
Science, as Valentine sees it, is basically math – everything can be translated into numbers. It seems sort of like looking at the programming code behind a video game vs. playing the game itself.
| Quote #5 Valentine: It's not about the behavior of fish. It's about the behavior of numbers. This thing works for any phenomenon which eats its own numbers – measles epidemics, rainfall averages, cotton prices, it's a natural phenomenon in itself. Spooky. (1.4) |
Translating everything into numbers highlights the similarities between things that usually seem totally different. But is something important lost by not considering the specifics of a particular numbers-producing thing?
| Quote #6 Hannah: "The testament of the lunatic serves as a caution against French fashion . . . for it was Frenchified mathematick that brought him to the melancholy certitude of a world without light or life . . . as a wooden stove that must consume itself until ash and stove are as one, and heat is gone from the earth. [...] He died aged two score years and seven, hoary as Job and meagre as a cabbage-stalk, the proof of his prediction even yet unyielding to his labours for the restitution of hope through good English algebra." (2.5) |
Once again, science appears as part of the culture that produces it – different scientific approaches become a battle of the English vs. the French. (It also picks up on Hannah's comments about "the real English landscape" being imported from Europe – "good English algebra" is actually an Arabic invention.)
