Philip Ball

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster whose many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and the wider culture include H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Color, The Music Instinct, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything, and, most recently, How to Grow a Human: Adventures in How We Are Made and Who We Are. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He lives in London.