Philip Ball

Philip Ball

Live Science Contributor

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty 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" and "The Music Instinct." His book "Critical Mass" won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also 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, and he was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. 

Latest articles by Philip Ball

a group of frogs in a pond with frogspawn

'[He] attempted to study fertilization in frogs by fitting the males with tiny trousers': The science of sperm in the 1700s

By Philip Ball published

Spallanzani has been described as having a "lust for knowledge": a passion that sometimes seemed to exceed propriety, as when he was said to have begun expounding enthusiastically to a group of dignitaries about the mating of frogs.

Animals
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) english mathematician, physicist and astronomer, author of the theory of terrestrial universal attraction, here dispersing light with a glass prism, engraving colorized document (Photo by Apic/Getty Images)

'Refraction is then all there is to it': How Isaac Newton's experiments revealed the mystery of light

By Philip Ball published

In this extract from the new book Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science, science writer Philip Ball explains how Isaac Newton transformed our understanding of light.

Physics & Mathematics