The Frayn Brain Drain

I shouldn't bother reading this, if I were you.  I'm feeling sorry for myself and given even a hint of encouragement I shall begin to wallow in self-pity.  As my regular readers know all too well by now, this blog is maintained by a steady injection by me of conceit and arrogance, bluster and prejudice.  True, it is occasionally enlivened by a facile gift for deadly insult, but the sad fact is that behind all this huffin' and puffin' there is something of a void.  I am aware of it but, like everyone with a weakness (that means you!), I try not to dwell on it. But then along comes bloody, bloody Michael Frayn with his book, The Human Touch, and blows away all my little pretensions - and I'm only on page 46!

Oddly enough, Frayn and I share something in our lives despite being complete strangers to each other.  Many years ago he served in that well-known oxymoron, Army Intelligence, as did I.  However, it was an indication of our differences that he served in the very brainy signals intelligence branch whilst I grubbed and snuffled around in the gutters of the all too appropriately named, counter-intelligence.  Then, later in our lives we both took an interest in theatre.  He became a world-renowned playwright with shows in London and on Broadway, whilst I became an amateur director gagging for a chance to direct one of his plays in a theatre that holds a hundred people.  Some time ago, totally unaware of each other (he still is of me), we both took an interest in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of science and the implications of quantum mechanics.  I read some books which I half understood and attended some lectures of which I understood even less;  he, not only wrote a brilliant play (Copenhagen) based on the ambiguities of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but he has now written a book of such tremendous excellence that I can hardly find the words to praise it enough, in which he sets off on a journey of intellectual wonderment through the thickets, forests and mountains of science and philosophy and the place of the human in this vast, cold, dark, mysterious universe - and, dammit, he does it with the lightest of touches.  His torch is his intelligence which shines ahead of him illuminating the path for author and reader alike, and as all the very best tour guides should do, he laces his musings with humour and obvious good nature.  Who could resist a writer who comes up with this acute piece of drollery on the subject of the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics in which it is proposed that at every possible juncture between two  (or more) possibilities, a parallel universe is created in which every possibility is acted out without the knowledge of the original particle concerned:

• Reading Deutsch [Dr. David Deutsch, the leading proponent of the 'many worlds' theory one of whose lectures I once attended] has encouraged me to adapt his approach to solving another mystery which has vexed theorists for many years - the single sock problem.  This is the converse of quantum interference, where a single particle apparently acquires virtual partners.  It is a matter of common knowledge that pairs of socks , while passing unobserved through the closed system of a washing machine, are repeatedly reduced to single socks, or at any rate to pairs consisting of one actual sock and one virtual sock undetectable by observation.

Do not suppose that Frayn's book is just knockabout fun at the expense of science and its practitioners.  This is a very serious enquiry by a layman equipped with nothing more than his own wit, intelligence, scholarship (in the sense of reading deeply and widely) and curiosity in order to come to some conclusions concerning the seemingly never-ending puzzles of this universe and our place in it.  It is exactly the sort of book that I wish I could have written but, alas, returning to the title of this post, it is Frayn who has the brain whilst what passes for mine is going down the drain!

Comments

[Tatyana]

But I bet he couldn't have written a better review of his book.
If I were interested in science (and less lazy), I might be even persuaded to read it!