The teacher decided that we should focus on works that had interesting implications for science.
Arcadia is one such work because it talks about what knowledge is, why it matters, and how historians bring their own biases to interpreting the past. We see characters in the past do one thing and characters in the present misinterpret it several times. We see a child prodigy discover math concepts before anyone else, and then have a historian dismiss the evidence of that because she had the ideas “too early,” even though her discoveries were basic and from first principles. The historian is trying to prove his incorrect pet theory but is blind to something even more significant because he doesn’t expect it. (All of this is from memory years later)
Other books we read in this class include A Canticle for Liebewitz and a book about Galileo whose name escapes me.