Philip Ball

Philip Ball (born 1962) is a British science writer. For over twenty years he has been an editor of the journal Nature, for which he continues to write regularly.
He is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine and a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and BBC Future.
He has contributed to publications ranging from New Scientist to the New York Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times, and New Statesman.
He has broadcast on many occasions on radio and TV, and in June 2004 presented a three-part serial on nanotechnology, Small Worlds, on BBC Radio 4.
Life
Ball holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a doctorate in physics from Bristol University.
As of 2008 he lives in London.
Work
Ball's 2004 book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. It examines a wide range of topics including the business cycle, random walks, phase transitions, bifurcation theory, traffic flow, Zipf's law, Small world phenomenon, catastrophe theory, the Prisoner's dilemma. The overall theme is one of applying modern mathematical models to social and economic phenomena.
In 2011, Ball published The Music Instinct in which he discusses how we make sense of sound and Music and emotion. He outlines what is known and still unknown about how music has such an emotional impact, and why it seems indispensable to humanity. He has since argued that music is emotively powerful due to its ability to mimic humans and through setting up expectations in pitch and harmony and then violating them.
Books
Designing the Molecular World: Chemistry at the Frontier (1994),
Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century (1997),
The Self-made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature (1999),
H2O: A Biography of Water (1999), (published in the U.S. as Life's Matrix)
Stories of the Invisible: A Guided Tour of Molecules (2001), (republished as Molecules: A Very Short Introduction (2003), OUP)
Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001),
The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements (2002), (republished as The Elements: A Very Short Introduction (2004), OUP)
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (2004),
Elegant Solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry (2005),
The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (2006),
The Sun and Moon Corrupted, a novel, Portobello Books Ltd, (2008),
Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral (2008),
Shapes, Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in three Parts (2009),
Flow, Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in three Parts (2009),
Branches, Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in three Parts (2009),
The Music Instinct (2010),
Unnatural, The Heretical Idea of Making People (2011),
Why Society is a Complex Matter: Meeting Twenty-first Century Challenges with a New Kind of Science (2012),
Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (2013),
Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler (2014), Read an excerpt.
Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (2015), University of Chicago Press, ; (2014), Random House
Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does (2016),
The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China (2017),
Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different (2018),
How to Grow a Human: Adventures in Who We Are and How We Are Made (2019),
The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science (2021)
The Elements: A Visual History of Their Discovery (2021)
The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens (2022),
Awards
Ball's Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another won the 2005 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. His book Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler (Bodley Head 2014) was on the shortlist for the 2014 prize.
Ball was awarded the Physics World Book of the Year 2018 for his book Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics Is Different (Bodley Head, 2018)
In 2019 Ball won the Kelvin Medal and Prize.
Awarded the Royal Society’s 2022 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for excellence in a subject relating to the history of science, philosophy of science or the social function of science.
Ball’s article “Should scientists run the country” won the 2022 award from the Association of British Science Writers for the best Opinion piece
References
External links
1962 births
Living people
Alumni of the University of Oxford
Alumni of the University of Bristol
English male journalists
English science writers
People associated with The Institute for Cultural Research