How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Act.Scene)
Quote #1
Thomasina: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. (1.1)
This seems to be the strength of Thomasina's scientific thinking: she's able to think about big ideas in familiar terms, and to make connections between seemingly unrelated things.
Quote #2
Bernard: Well, by comparing sentence structures and so forth, this chap showed that there was a ninety per cent change that the story had indeed been written by the same person as Women in Love. To my inexpressible joy, one of your maths mob was able to show that on the same statistical basis there was a ninety percent chance that Lawrence also wrote the Just William books and much of the previous day's Brighton and Hove Argus. (1.2)
While Bernard's main interest here seems to be in seeing one of his rivals get burned, this incident also suggests that scientific methods don't quite work for analyzing literature – and that English teachers won't be replaced by computers any time soon (we hope). Perhaps not quite everything can be reduced to numbers.
Quote #3
Valentine: When your Thomasina was doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world. (1.4)
It's interesting that Valentine uses art as a metaphor for what's happening in science, and that parallel changes in science and in art happened at around the same time. This might suggest that scientific thought isn't entirely objective, but depends at least in part on what's happening in the larger culture – how people see the world at that point in time.
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.)
Quote #7
Hannah: Oh!, but . . . how beautiful!
Valentine: The Coverly set. [...] See? In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing. I can't show you how deep it goes. Each picture is a detail of the previous one, blown up. And so on. For ever. (2.7)
While Bernard may think that poetry (Byron especially) has a monopoly on beauty, this suggests that mathematics can be pretty as well. (Though you might want to stick with poetry rather than pi for your next love letter – or not, depending on who you're writing to.)
Quote #8
Valentine: Heat goes to cold. It's a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What's happening to your tea is happening to everything everywhere. The sun and the stars. It'll take a while but we're all going to end up at room temperature. When your hermit set up shop nobody understood this. But let's say you're right, in 18-whatever nobody knew more about heat than this scribbling nutter living in a hovel in Derbyshire. [...] Whatever he thought he was doing to save the world with good English algebra it wasn't this! [...] Because there's an order things can't happen in. You can't open a door till there's a house. (2.7)
This passage picks up on the theme of genius in the text, and what geniuses can and can't do – according to Valentine here, even a scientific genius is limited by her or his moment in history. Does a poetic genius suffer from the same limitations?
Quote #9
Septimus: Geometry, Hobbes assures us in the Leviathan, is the only science God has been pleased to bestow on mankind.
[...]
Thomasina: Oh, pooh to Hobbes! Mountains are not pyramids and trees are not cones. God must love gunnery and architecture if Euclid is his only geometry. (2.7)
Thomasina wants science to deal not just with abstract ideals, but also with the real world. The science of her time – or at least the sense of it we get from the play – wants to clean up the messiness of life, while Thomasina wants to document the mess.
Quote #10
Valentine: She didn't have the maths, not remotely. She saw what things meant, way ahead, like seeing a picture.
Septimus: This is not science. This is story-telling. (2.7)
Septimus's words imply that science and storytelling are two entirely different things – but putting that statement right after Valentine's makes us question that difference.