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.

Biography

Ball holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a doctorate in physics from Bristol University. 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. Ball has written a research review on organism-centered evolution. He has contributed to publications ranging from New Scientist to the New York Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times, and New Statesman. In June 2004 he presented a three-part serial on nanotechnology, Small Worlds, on BBC Radio 4.

Selected publications

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 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. In 2019 Ball won the Kelvin Medal and Prize. Ball's article "Should scientists run the country" won the 2022 award from the Association of British Science Writers for the best opinion piece. He was also 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.