Senior Fellow of Scientific Integration and Natural Philosophy
Philip Ball, Ph.D
Philip Ball holds degrees in chemistry and physics, and he has been Marginalia Review of Book's Editor for Science since 2021, where he is currently the Lead Researcher for the Meanings of Life Project: The New Biology, at Marginalia's Institute for the Meanings of Science.
Ball was an editor at Nature for over 20 years, where he remains a regular contributor, and he has published extensively in national newspapers and magazines, including Chemistry World, The New World, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, Prospect, Scientific American, and Natural History.
As the author of over 90 peer-reviewed articles—including areas such as physics, chemistry, and molecular biology—and over 25 peer-reviewed books. Ball's work has a global impact at the intersection of the arts and sciences, expressed in a lifetime commitment to sharing the social, cultural, and historical context of science through award-winning science writing.
Ball is the recipient of 20 prizes and awards, which most recently include the Lord Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics (2019), the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal (2022), and the Charles Simonyi Lecture at the University of Oxford (2025), a prestigious lecture chosen by the incumbent Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He has broadcast on radio and TV, including the BBC World Service, US National Public Radio, and BBC Radio 4, where he was the presenter of the history of science series, “Science Stories.”
Books by Philip Ball
Designing the Molecular World: Chemistry at the Frontier (Princeton University Press, 1994)
Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 1997)
The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature (Oxford University Press, 1998)
H2O: A Biography of Water (Weidenfeld & Nicholson/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999)
Stories of the Invisible: A Guided Tour of Molecules (Oxford University Press, 2001)
Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (Penguin/FSG, 2001)
The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another (Heinemann/FSG, 2004)
Elegant Solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2005)
The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (Heinemann/FSG, 2006).
Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Origins of Order (Bodley Head/HarperCollins, 2008).
The Sun and Moon Corrupted, a novel (Portobello, 2008).
Nature’s Patterns: a trilogy consisting of Shapes, Flow and Branches (Oxford University Press, 2009).
The Music Instinct (Bodley Head, 2010).
Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People (Bodley Head, 2011).
Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (Bodley Head, 2012).
Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler (Bodley Head, 2013).
Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (Bodley Head, 2014)
Patterns in Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China (Bodley Head, 2016)
Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different (Bodley Head, 2018)
How To Grow A Human: Adventures in Who We Are and How We Are Made (Harper Collins, 2019)
The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science (MIT Press, 2021)
The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
The Elements: A Visual History of Their Discovery (Thames & Hudson/University of Chicago Press, 2021)
The Book of Minds: How To Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens (Picador, 2022)
Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (University of Chicago Press, 2024)
Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and the Birth of Modern Science (Yale University Press, 2025)
The Man Who Broke Reality: Niels Bohr and the Making of Modern Physics (Little Brown/University of Chicago Press, 2026)
