Michael Frayn & the Universe

You like the way Michael Frayn writes.Michael Frayn likes to write about philosophy.Therefore you might like the way Michael Frayn writes about philosophy.
This syllogism would appear to be the logic behind The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe. Frayn is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and translator who has reached a worldwide audience through two works in particular, the plays Noises Off and Copenhagen. He read philosophy at Cambridge in the 1950s and in the 1970s published a work of philosophy, Constructions. What's more, his writings often sport a philosophical turn of mind. Noises Off wasn't just a farce; it was a farce within a farce—a deconstruction of a farce. Copenhagen wasn't just a character study; it was a study of character in uncertainty—featuring the two physicists who gave the world the quantum concept of uncertainty. So, we might think, what more engaging guide to lead us non-philosophers on a tour of philosophy?
In particular, Frayn proposes that he lead us through nothing less than the whole of our species' relationship to the universe, both in the 13.7-billion-years-old-and-born-in-a-Big-Bang and in the Michael-Frayn-chose-marmalade-over-honey-at-breakfast-this-morning senses of the word. He begins the tour with science, "a palace of thought," and in the first third of the book, he methodically walks us through rooms of an increasingly fundamental significance: first the laws of nature, then cause and effect, then space and time, and finally, the power of numbers to capture it all. At each stop he invites us to examine the tapestries on the walls, and then to look closer, and closer still, until we see not the pattern but the weave, not the weave but the thread, the now we can never definitively experience, the there that dissolves into Planck-scale discontinuity. Look closely enough, Frayn argues, and the laws of nature "have no existence independent of the concepts to which they relate," and "the supposedly universal causality on which the laws of nature depend has no more existence than the laws themselves," and so on, each subsequent seeming understanding of the universe finding expression "only in the context of human thought and human purposes."