It is sometimes a joy to see an argument or a theory working itself out on a page, even as you read it.

Time, space, consciousness. You can't get three larger, more mysterious concepts than these. Michael Lockwood is a philosopher at Oxford. In The Labyrinth of Time, he takes on these ideas and tries to work his way to a coherent view. He doesn't totally succeed, but it's a valiant attempt.

Lockwood consistently tries to embody or incorporate into daily experience some of the weirdest, most counter-intuitive thoughts humans have ever had. And it takes him down unexpected paths. For instance, when he tries to explain curved space-time, he talks about what Einstein once described as "the happiest thought of his life", which was that someone experiencing weightlessness in a sealed and windowless room would not be able to tell if the room were in free fall, or if it were moving at a constant velocity or at rest.

Unpredictably, Lockwood claims that Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland) "anticipated Einstein's 'happiest thought' in his book Sylvie and Bruno" and appends an extract from the book to prove it.

This kind of eclecticism abounds in Lockwood's introduction to the universe. It results in Einstein, Hubble, Alexander Friedmann and Saint Augustine being quoted and discussed within three pages. Later, he brings together experiments on echolocation in bats with comments made by basketballer Michael Jordan and Franz Brentano, the inventor of European phenomenology, to explain how our perception of time seems elastic.

Lockwood's book tries to bridge the gap between explanations of timespace that approach it as a product of one scientific theory or another, and those explanations that rely more on psychological or perceptual theories.

This is often nothing more than a clash of scales - subatomic versus human versus cosmic - but even that sounds like a bit of an avoidance of the problem because it's just too hard.

Lockwood tries to work his way through and although he's not always convincing, even when he fails, there's a certain excitement in the attempt.