Philip Ball

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than 20 years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water (1999), Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001), The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It (2010), and How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (2023). His book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (2004) won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball was the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy, or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He lives in London.