The Human Touch – Our Part in the Creation of the Universe by Michael Frayn, Faber and Faber. Hardback ISBN 9780571232178, £20.
British author and dramatist Michael Frayn is extremely bright and so multifariously talented that it must be difficult for him to know in which direction to channel his prodigious energies. Frayn is best known for his translations of Russian classics, an impressive series of novels (including Spies) and some memorable plays – notably the classic comedy Noises Off. In 1998, he took a new direction with Copenhagen, a highly successful piece of theatre that imagines what happened when quantum pioneers Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg – each privy to different sets of nuclear secrets – met during the Second World War.
Remote and inaccessible, quantum science is the Cinderella of modern culture. Frayn, however, showed that – fleshed out with characters – it can make successful theatre. Emboldened by the success of Copenhagen, other authors have followed suit, while Frayn has ventured into much deeper scientific waters with his latest book.
In The Human Touch, he struggles to disentangle the actual universe from our perception of it. Words and language are what Frayn is good at, and there is some excellent analysis of the syntax in which such a conscious picture is based. On the other hand, he also acknowledges that the description ultimately must become mathematical (quoting Feynman’s remark that no amount of intellectual preparation can make deaf ears experience the music of others), but the book has no mathematics. "A non-scientist (like myself) is a fool to trespass in this great palace of thought," admits Frayn as he meanders on.
The essence is the "unresolvable paradox" of having to reconcile the 14 billion years of the existence of the universe with the fleeting timespan of human consciousness. Frayn’s conclusion is that "the world has no form or substance without you and me to provide them; and you and I have no form or substance without the world to provide them in its turn". An example of this: "When scientists talk about objects that exist in space–time… it seems for a moment as if this makes them somehow independent of human experience."
Frayn acknowledges that Jonathan Bennett, his Cambridge philosophy teacher, sees the book’s viewpoint as "anthropocentrism run amok". Anthropocentrism flourished when quantum mechanics revealed the bizarre role of the observer in the outcome of things, but became less important as quantum mechanics progressed to the bowels of the human intellectual digestive system.
The extensive footnotes display how Frayn has read far and wide, but not in any scientific depth. When he does tinker with real science, it is clumsy – as when he talks of "the discovery that imaginary numbers were a good model for the paradoxical behaviour of particles in quantum conditions" – and there is a puzzling description of the meaning of negative numbers. It is a rambling book with an index encompassing Democritos, Hitler, Newton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Noam Chomsky, sexual arousal, Father Christmas, St Matthew, and oboes.
All books have errors. Here, the concept of the "arrow of time" was introduced by Eddington in 1927, not posthumously in 1958; the concept of zero, attributed to the Greeks, was imported from the Orient (the Arabic zifr is commemorated in our "cipher"); our understanding of the development of galaxies is somehow attributed to Victor Weisskopf; and the vital role of symmetry breaking in modern theory is confined to a mention of its role in the weak interactions of radioactive decay. Maybe this was something that Frayn felt he had to get off his chest. Having done so, he should return as quickly as possible to what he excels in: to entertain us and win more awards.
Gordon Fraser, Divonne-les-Bains.