THE HUMAN TOUCH: OUR PART IN THE CREATION OF A UNIVERSE

  • Michael Frayn
Faber and Faber: 2006. 505 pp. £20

Michael Frayn is an accomplished novelist and playwright, best known by physicists for his superb play Copenhagen. Based on the meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in occupied Denmark during the Second World War, Copenhagen achieved significant success as a play, and a warm reception from the physics community. It also led to Bohr's estate releasing various letters that he had written, but never sent, much sooner than intended.

Given this background, there is every reason to look forward to a hefty non-fiction book from Frayn with the subtitle Our Part in the Creation of a Universe. But note that word “our”: The Human Touch is very much concerned with our conceptions of the Universe and reality. In other words, this is a book about philosophy. Frayn argues, in a nutshell, that the Universe only makes sense because we are here. I am not the only reader to find this surprising. In the acknowledgements Frayn confesses that his old philosophy tutor and long-time friend, Jonathan Bennett, described the book as “anthropocentrism run amok”.

It is true that the ideas of reality and observation are inextricably linked in quantum theory in a way that encourages many physicists to be philosophical. Frayn has clearly read widely, and not just the obvious popular books, but, unlike Copenhagen, physics is not centre stage here (although it is discussed at length in the copious notes). One begins to wonder where he is heading, however, when he starts to cast doubts on the existence of the Universe before humans arrived to observe it. Part of the appeal of cosmology is that the sheer vastness of the Universe means that we can view parts of it as they were at various different eras of its history, including times long before our arrival.

There are interesting passages on different types of laws, for instance, that the open-minded physicist will enjoy. Are the laws of nature constitutive (do they somehow create the world) or are they regulatory (do they control its behaviour)? Would the world exist, would angular momentum be conserved, would entropy always increase, Frayn mischievously asks, if these laws did not exist? And what caused the Titantic to sink? Frayn advances a raft of plausible causes, few of them that will be obvious to readers (like myself) unable to see beyond the iceberg.

But such passages are the exception rather than the rule and, overall, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the pedantic nature of real philosophy has little to offer real physics. “Philosophy has never culminated in any generally accepted body of doctrine, or even seemed to be on the road towards it, as science is thought to be by many scientists,” as Frayn concedes in his opening prospectus. But it is his take on the Universe at large that is most surprising: “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.”

His views remind me of the joke about an engineer, a physicist and a mathematician who are on a train in Scotland. The engineer looks out of the window, sees a black sheep and says: “All Scottish sheep are black.” The physicist disagrees: “No, some Scottish sheep are black.” The mathematician is not impressed: “There is at least one field, containing at least one sheep, of which at least one side is black.” If Frayn's book is any guide, a philosopher on the train would correct the mathematician: “There is at least one field, containing at least one sheep, of which at least one side was black at the instant you looked at it, although there is no way of knowing that it is still black — whatever black means. And what is a sheep anyway?”

Lest the reader think that such a joke trivializes Frayn's arguments, I should point out that The Human Touch is full of personal anecdotes and everyday examples, including countless references to cars, snooker and the best approach to use when asking a girl out on a date. Now there's a subject on which physicists could benefit from outside advice.

On our bookshelf

Moonshine Beyond the Monster

  • Terry Gannon
Cambridge Univ. Press: 2006. 492 pp. £75

The first book on the theory of Moonshine, explaining the connection between the monster finite group, modular functions and vertex operator algebras, as well as those between mathematics and theoretical physics.

New in paperback

Cryostat Design, Material Properties, and Superconductor Critical-Current Testing

  • Jack W. Ekin
Oxford Univ. Press: 2006. 704 pp. £65.

A practical 'how to' book that contains the details the author wishes he'd been told when he began his low-temperature career.