Ian Garrick-Mason

Making it up as we go

For the scales at which we live — the buildings we inhabit, the vehicles we drive, the sports we play — classical physics is a useful, highly accurate and reassuringly comprehensible system. But at scales we never personally encounter, at immense velocities, infinitesimal sizes or cosmic distances, things are not so simple. In these worlds, time passes more slowly or quickly depending on one’s own speed, light beams travel on bendy paths through a universe of dented spacetime and electrons are not distinct particles but rather probabilistic clouds which collapse into specific measurements only when we observe them.

The novelist and playwright Michael Frayn is fascinated by such worlds. Copenhagen, his hit play about a 1941 conversation between physicists Werner Heisenberg (creator of the famous ‘Uncertainty Principle’) and Niels Bohr, addressed the parallels between the indeterminacy of the quantum world and the indeterminacy of the human mind. The Human Touch is an extension of this idea, or rather more than an extension: it is a grand tour through the idea’s many implications and paradoxes.

As indicated by the book’s subtitle, Frayn’s goal is to rehumanise the universe by proving to us that the nature of the world we perceive is one that is greatly dependent on interactions with our own minds. ‘It’s the world’s oldest mystery,’ he writes. ‘Is the world in one way or another out there, or is it in here?’ Frayn’s well-honed skill at introspection and his training in philosophy make him the perfect guide to the subjective world of a human being. Using detailed thought experiments and well-chosen metaphors, he depicts afresh the experiences of thinking and deciding, experiences which are more befogged and murky than we assume. One’s mind is first uncertain and then suddenly it is made up; there is no tangible moment or act of ‘decision’ that we can claim as our own.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in