Complex reflections on cosmos and consciousness

The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe
By Michael Frayn
Metropolitan, 505 pp., $32.50

Fifty years ago Michael Frayn studied philosophy at Cambridge and then changed course to become one of Britain's most ingenious and beguiling novelists and playwrights. Not an entire change, perhaps. His brightly barbed fictions kept snagging shreds of philosophical and scientific concerns, notably and respectively with the novel "Spies" and the play "Copenhagen."

Now, with "The Human Touch," Frayn launches himself back into the galaxy of abstract questions traditionally and continually debated by thinkers. They range from epistemology (how we know things), to the question of will (how we decide), to the nature of language, to number theory, to the still-unsettled frontiers of relativity, quantum physics, and cosmology.

Prime place among the acknowledg ments for this massively studied work -- 60 of its 500-odd pages are notes -- is given to Frayn's former philosophy professor, Jonathan Bennett , who, Frayn acknowledges, chastises him for "anthropocentrism run amok." Which I cite to introduce the thesis of this immensely complicated, tediously iterative, often foggy -- a fog in which the writer as well as the reader risks being lost -- and sometimes brilliant book: "Man is the measure of all things."

An old saying and past its sell-by date, but Frayn sharpens it to note that, clearly, the only measuring that gets done, whether in the infinitesimal realm of subatomics or the immensity of nebulae, is done by humans. Having sharpened, he launches it, arrowlike.

When we say that the universe (or the quark) "is" in any particular way, this "is" is only "is" because we say it. Big, little, moving in time or timeless, caused or random -- these are attributes whose meaning lies not in the things themselves but in what we try to perceive of them.

"The universe plainly exists independently of human consciousness; but what can ever be said about it that has not been mediated through that consciousness ?" he writes. "And if nothing can be said about it, nothing seen, nothing understood, what kind of a universe would it be? We have to imagine something like the situation at the beginning of Genesis, before the first day of Creation -- something without form and void." But "even to say that it is without form and void -- even to describe it as something -- to imply that it so much as exists -- is to resort to language and to all the powers of human consciousness."

Frayn's thesis accompanies the scientific and philosophic subjects he explores, accompanies them, that is, as a dolphin might accompany a sailboat: surfacing, submerging for long stretches, resurfacing with decorative splashes.

He demystifies the concepts of physical laws and cause-and-effect that played such a central role in the great history of science. Those laws, he writes, were human constructs, the instruments of classifying from Newton up through the 19th century. For prior millennia they were unperceived, and for the past 100 years or so their failure to apply to quantum mechanics, with its uncertainty paradoxes, and to the large questions of astrophysics (what cause preceded the Big Bang?) has become evident.

Frayn's intention is to use his gift of language and imagery to make these scientific frontiers understandable to the nonspecialist. There are, indeed, any number of lively metaphors, as when he raises doubts about cause-and-effect by analyzing billiard strokes at the North Balham Sporting and Social Club. He does it with kilometric meticulousness, though: the winged novelist paying the footnote debts of the onetime philosophy student.

In any case, the flourishes are at best frosting on a cake that remains resolutely indigestible. Frayn is frank about his own problems digesting such difficult subjects. He describes Richard Feynman , that master of intelligibility, voicing his skepticism. "However simply he attempts to translate physical laws into plain language, he can't really make you understand the beauty and force of them if you can't understand their mathematical expression."

There are conceits that simply trudge in place. In a chapter on free will, the author fills page after page with the factors that made him choose between marmalade and honey. Even then, he seems to omit appetite and habit. It's enough to make you swear off breakfast with him, which would be a pity. Dinner, perhaps, if we can be sure he won't freeze at the first bite, trying to decide between steak and sprouts.

All this said, there are moments when the artist breaks free. We get a lovely claim for fiction rather than fact as our paradigm. Would Darwin's evolution have produced its revolution in our sense of the world, without Genesis to precede it? And, this amiably shrewd unbeliever writes: "We have to know that God made man before we can understand that man made God."

And at the end, recalling the torch-lit search that sent him on this wandering and overlong journey: "This is what it comes down to in the end: 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. We are supporting the globe on our shoulders, like Atlas -- and we are standing on the globe that we are supporting."

Because: It is not that Frayn argues human consciousness as the main reality of the universe. Rather, he holds it to be a constituting element, as much, say, as gravitation or light.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.