Philip Ball


Philip Ball 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 now writes a regular column in Chemistry World. He has contributed to publications ranging from New Scientist to the New York Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times and New Statesman. He is the regular contributor to Prospect magazine, and also a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials and BBC Future. He has broadcast on many occasions on radio and TV, and in June 2004 he presented a three-part serial on nanotechnology, Small Worlds, on BBC Radio 4.

Work

Ball's most popular book is the 2004 Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, winner of 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, he wrote The Music Instinct in which he discusses how we make sense of sound and how music entices us. 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.
Ball holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a doctorate in physics from Bristol University. As of 2008 he has lived in London.

Books

His book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another won the 2005 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, and his book Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler was on the shortlist for the 2014 prize. In 2019 he won the Kelvin Medal and Prize.