Arcadia

The traditional idealized rural setting of Greek and Roman pastoral poetry later a popular setting in the art and literature of the Renaissance. Nicolas Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia Ego (1629-30) shows shepherds and a nymph reading the inscription on a tomb. The title can be translated as "I, who am now dead, also lived once in Arcadia" or the more foreboding "Even in Arcadia, there am I [Death]".

The Enlightenment

A 17th and 18th century philosophical movement concerned with the use of reason to understand the Universe and humanity’s place in it.

Romanticism

A movement in European art, music and literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, characterised by an emphasis on feeling and content rather than order and form, on the sublime, supernatural and exotic, and the free expression of the passions and individuality.

Chaos theory

The area of mathematics, first developed in the 1970s, that sets out to model unpredictable phenomena, such as the weather, the growth of animal populations, or the human heartbeat, using non-linear equations. Simple rules can give rise to complex phenomena, and the end result is exquisitely sensitive to the starting conditions. It turns out that Nature uses such rules rather than Newton’s to produce leaves, clouds, snowflakes and thunderstorms.

Fermat’s Last Theorem

The French mathematician Pierre de Fermat died in 1665. A note found in the margin of his textbook Arithmetica declared he had found a proof for his theorem that xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ has no solutions where n is a whole number greater than 2, but did not have room to write it down. The proof was finally found by the Cambridge mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1993.

The Newcomen Steam Engine

Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729) invented the first atmospheric steam engine in 1712. His idea, subsequently developed and improved, was a major landmark on the way towards the Industrial Revolution.

Newton’s Laws of Motion

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) stated that three fixed mechanical laws could account for all the movement in the Universe. Pushed to its logical conclusion, this deterministic view meant that all future movement could be predicted according to a single formula by the positions and directions of all currently existing objects. This idea was first made explicit by Pierre Simon de Laplace in his Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the final volume of which was published in 1825.

Population Biology

The study of the rise and fall of animal populations in relation to predation, food supply, mating success etc. Scientists working in this field were among the first to see that each year’s population size could be related to the next by a simple mathematical equation, yet still be unpredictable in the Newtonian sense (see Chaos theory).

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

First discovered by the French engineer Nicolas Leonard Sadi Carnot in 1824, and formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius in 1850, the Second Law states that heat cannot pass from a colder to a hotter body. One consequence is the concept of entropy, enunciated by another German, Hermann von Helmholtz, in 1854, which states that everything in the Universe is destined to cool down until all activity ceases.

Hermits

A hermitage was a popular feature of English landscape gardens in the 18th and 19th centuries. Pain’s Hill in Surrey, recently restored, was no exception. But the hermit recruited there (through a newspaper advertisement) by the owner the Hon. Charles Hamilton, lasted only a fortnight before being found under the table in the local pub.

The Picturesque

A development of English landscape design popular in the early 19th century, when the calm tranquillity of lawns, lakes and Grecian temples gave way to jagged, irregular shapes, ruins and "romantic" wildness.

Francis Jeffrey

Critic and editor of the Edinburgh Review, who in 1806 agreed to fight a duel with a poet whose work he had panned. The enterprise was forestalled by the police, arriving in the nick of time, much to the relief of the combatants.

Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828)

Wife of Viscount Melbourne, romantic author, and lover of Byron, to whom she was passionately attached during 1812.

Mrs (Ann) Radcliffe (1764-1823)

English novelist whose best-known work, celebrated (and mocked) in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, was The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

Lord Byron
(1788-1824)

English Romantic poet, author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18) and Don Juan (1819-24). Left England hurriedly and without explanation in the summer of 1809, bound for Albania, Greece and the Levant (Turkey). Returned to England two years later, conducted numerous affairs, notably with Lady Caroline Lamb, and entered into a short-lived marriage with Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815. Died at Missolonghi in Greece, fighting for Greek independence.