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.