All books by Philip Ball

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The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements

The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements, a book by Philip Ball.

This companion volume to "Stories of the Invisible" looks at how our ideas about the fundamental constitution of matter have evolved through the ages, from the four classical elements of Aristotle to the creation of new, artificial elements in the particle-smashing machines of physics laboratories.

Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Colour

Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Colour. A book by Philip Ball. This book investigates how the invention of new pigments and colouring materials since times of antiquity have affected the course of Western art. The creative potential of painters has always been constrained by the colours on their palette. Several major innovations in art, such as the Venetian style of painting during the Renaissance...

H2O: A Biography of Water

H2O: A Biography of Water. A book by Philip Ball.

In the Old Testament, the God of the Hebrews hovers over the primeval waters and brings forth the world from the infinite ocean. It is a motif echoed in creation myths throughout the world. In each, water is the fundamental precondition for life. Yet the extent to which water remains a scientific mystery is extraordinary, despite its prevalence and central importance on Earth. Whether one considers its role in biology, its place in the physical world (where it refuses to obey the usual rules of liquids) or its deceptively simple chemistry, there is still no complete answer to the question: what is water? This book explains what, exactly, we do and do not know about the strange character of this most essential and ubiquitous of substances.

Stories of the Invisible: A Guided Tour of Molecules

Stories of the Invisible: A Guided Tour of Molecules. A book by Philip Ball.

From a community of molecules, life somehow emerges. It seems miraculous, for molecules have no intrinsic life of their own. Life is a result of their interactions, their communication, cooperation, competition and motion. This book uses the chemistry of life to explain what molecules are, how and why chemists make new ones, and how the molecular sciences are eroding the boundaries between natural and synthetic ...

The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature

The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature Why do similar patterns and forms appear in settings that seem to bear no relation to one another? The windblown ripples of desert sand follow a sinuous course that resembles the stripes of a zebra or a marine fish. We see the same architectural angles in the trellis-like shells of microscopic sea creatures as in the bubble walls of a foam. The forks of lightning mirror the branches of a river or a tree.