Books by Philip Ball

The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China by Philip Ball

The Water Kingdom takes us on a grand journey through China’s past and present, offering a unique window through which we can begin to grasp the overwhelming complexity and teeming energy of the country and its people.

Water is the key that unlocks much of China’s history and thought. The ubiquitous relationship that the Chinese people have had with water has made it an enduring metaphor for philosophical thought and artistic expression. From the Han emperors to Mao, the ability to manage the waters – to provide irrigation and defend against floods – became a barometer of political legitimacy, and attempts to do so have involved engineering works on a gigantic scale. Yet the strain that economic growth is putting on its water resources today may be the greatest threat to China’s future.

A History Book of the Year in The Times and The Economist

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Patterns in Nature, Why the Natural World Looks the Way it Does by Philip Ball

Although at first glance the natural world may appear overwhelming in its diversity and complexity, there are regularities running through it, from the hexagons of a honeycomb to the spirals of a seashell and the branching veins of a leaf. Revealing the order at the foundation of the seemingly chaotic natural world, Patterns in Nature explores not only the math and science but also the beauty and artistry behind nature’s awe-inspiring designs.

Unlike the patterns we create in technology, architecture, and art, natural patterns are formed spontaneously from the forces that act in the physical world. Very often the same types of pattern and form – spirals, stripes, branches, and fractals, say—recur in places that seem to have nothing in common, as when the markings of a zebra mimic the ripples in windblown sand. That’s because, as Patterns in Nature shows, at the most basic level these patterns can often be described using the same mathematical and physical principles: there is a surprising underlying unity in the kaleidoscope of the natural world.

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Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen by Philip Ball

Invisible presents the first comprehensive survey of the roles that the idea of invisibility has played throughout time and culture. This territory takes us from medieval grimoires to cutting-edge nanotechnology, from fairy tales to telecommunications, from camouflage to early cinematography, and from beliefs about ghosts to the dawn of nuclear physics and the discovery of dark energy. We need to attend to many voices: to Plato and Shakespeare, to James Clerk Maxwell and Victorian music-hall magicians. We will discover new worlds: some of them already known, some sheer fantasy, others whose existence has been asserted but is yet to be proved.

Science is said to be on the threshold of achieving the ancient dream of making objects invisible. But the stories that we have told about invisibility are not about technical capability but about power, sex, concealment, morality and corruption. Precisely because they refer to matters that lie beyond our senses, unseen beings and worlds have long been a repository for hopes, fears and suppressed desires. Ideas of invisibility are, like all ideas rooted in legend, ultimately parables about our own potential and weaknesses.

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Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler by Philip Ball

In January 1940, the Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate Peter Debye, formerly one of the leading physicists in Hitler’s Germany, sailed from Genoa to the United States. The official story was that he was taking a leave of absence from directing the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin in order to deliver a series of lectures at Cornell University. In fact Debye never returned to Germany, but settled in America and contributed to the Allied war effort against the country in which he had worked for most of his life.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books by Philip Ball

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Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything by Philip Ball

Curiosity is dangerous. But it’s far worse than you think, for curiosity was the original sin. In Christian tradition, all the ills of the world follow from the attempt in the Garden to grasp – literally to consume – forbidden knowledge. “When you eat of it”, said the serpent to Eve, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.” Through curiosity, our innocence was lost.

Yet this hasn’t deterred us; quite the reverse. It is said that God created Adam only at the end of his six-day labours so that the man should not see how the trick was done. Ever since then, we seem to have been trying to discover exactly how that trick was done.

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Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People by Philip Ball

Can we make a human being? That question has been asked for many centuries, and has produced recipes ranging from the homunculus of the medieval alchemists and the clay golem of Jewish legend to the cadaverous mosaic of Frankenstein’s monster and the mass-produced test-tube babies of Brave New World’s Hatcheries. All of these efforts to create artificial people are more or less fanciful, but they have taken deep root in Western culture. They all express fears about the allegedly treacherous, Faustian nature of technology, and they all question whether any artificially created person can be truly human. Legends of people-making are tainted by suspicions of impiety and hubris, and they are regarded as the ultimately ‘unnatural’ act, offering a revealing glimpse of changing attitudes to the relationship between nature and human art.
In Unnatural, I delve beneath the surface of the cultural history of ‘anthropoesis’ – the creation of artificial people – to explore what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul.

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The Music Instinct: How music works, and why we can’t do without it by Philip Ball

The Music Instinct offers the first comprehensive, accessible survey of what is known – and what remains unknown – about how music works: why we can comprehend it, why we are moved by it, why we make music and what roles it serves in culture and society.

It also advances some new ideas about those questions, pointing out where there are current gaps in our enquiries and investigations and suggesting new directions.

It will help the reader understand what is happening when they listen to music: how their brain is decoding the complex sound signal, discerning patterns and regularities and forming interpretations and expectations that create a sense of aesthetic pleasure – or not, as the case may be.

In this way, the book will not only enhance readers’ appreciation of the music they love, but also encourage them to look at all music in a new light and perhaps to begin exploring music that previously seemed opaque or dull or daunting.

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Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts by Philip Ball

Patterns are everywhere in nature – in the ranks of clouds in the sky, the stripes of an angelfish, the arrangement of petals in flowers. Where does this order and regularity come from? It creates itself. The patterns we see come from self-organization. Whether in living or non-living systems, there is a pattern-forming tendency inherent in the basic structure and processes of nature.

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Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind by Philip Ball

In the twelfth century, Christians in Europe began to build a completely new kind of church – not the squat, gloomy buildings we now call Romanesque, but soaring, spacious monuments flooded with light from immense windows. These were the first Gothic churches, and they culminated in the cathedral of Chartres, where all the elements of the new style cohered perfectly for the first time.

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The Sun and Moon Corrupted by Philip Ball

Karl Neder – physicist, Communist and all-round maverick – thinks he has made a discovery that will offer mankind energy for free. But no one believes him – or rather, no one understands him. And so he is forced to wander like a vagabond across Cold War Europe, an outcast from his native Hungary, leaving chaos and half-built machines in his wake.

But who, and where, exactly is Karl Neder? Young journalist Lena Romanowicz wants to find out, hoping to kick-start a stalled career but driven more by motives she would rather not interrogate.

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