How to Grow a Human

PHILIP BALL

William Collins

Philip Ball explores the age-old question: are there any 'laws of nature' that guide human affairs? Is there anything inevitable about the ways humans behave and organize themselves? Have we complete freedom in creating our societies or are we trapped by 'human nature'?

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. Philip Ball

Science & Math

Random House]

Paracelsus was part alchemist, part father of modern chemistry. He was a charlatan and a genius, an adventurer and a model for later versions of the Faust legend, such as Goethe's or Thomas Mann's. His life was as eventful and bizarre as an 18th-century picaresque novel. Philip Ball tells his story.

The Devil's Doctor

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Arrow Books

A timely reissue of a brilliant exploration of the science of art and of colour

Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour

Vintage Books USA

The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It

Why have all human cultures - today and throughout history - made music? Why does music excite such rich emotion? And how do we make sense of musical sound? These are questions that have, until recently, remained mysterious. Now "The Music Instinct" explores how the latest research in music psychology and brain science is piecing together the puzzle of how our minds understand and respond to music. Ranging from Bach fugues to nursery rhymes to heavy rock, Philip Ball interweaves philosophy, mathematics, history and neurology to reveal why music moves us in so many ways. Without requiring any specialist knowledge, "The Music Instinct" will both deepen your appreciation of the music you love, and open doors to music that once seemed alien, dull or daunting, offering a passionate plea for the importance of music in education and in everyday life.

Humor & Entertainment

Can we make a human being? The question has been asked for many centuries, and has produced recipes ranging from the clay golem of Jewish legend to the mass-produced test-tube babies in Brave New World. Unnatural delves beneath the surface of the cultural history of 'anthropoeia' - the artificial creation of people - to explore what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul. Philip Ball traces the threads that link the legendary inventor Daedalus, Goethe's tragic Faust, the automata-making magicians of E.T.A. Hoffman and Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein. He argues that these old tales and myths are alive and well, subtly manipulating the current debates about assisted conception, embryo research and human cloning, which have at last made the idea of 'making people' into flesh and blood reality.

Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Vintage Books

Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler

Vintage

If offered the chance—by cloak, spell, or superpower—to be invisible, who wouldn’t want to give it a try? We are drawn to the idea of stealthy voyeurism and the ability to conceal our own acts, but as desirable as it may seem, invisibility is also dangerous. It is not just an optical phenomenon, but a condition full of ethical questions. As esteemed science writer Philip Ball reveals in this book, the story of invisibility is not so much a matter of how it might be achieved but of why we want it and what we would do with it. In this lively look at a timeless idea, Ball provides the first comprehensive history of our fascination with the unseen. This sweeping narrative moves from medieval spell books to the latest nanotechnology, from fairy tales to telecommunications, from camouflage to ghosts to the dawn of nuclear physics and the discovery of dark energy.  Along the way, Invisible tells little-known stories about medieval priests who blamed their misdeeds on spirits; the Cock Lane ghost, which intrigued both Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens; the attempts by Victorian scientist William Crookes to detect forces using tiny windmills; novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s belief that he was unseen when in his dressing gown; and military efforts to enlist magicians to hide tanks and ships during WWII.  Bringing in such voices as Plato and Shakespeare, Ball provides not only a scientific history but a cultural one—showing how our simultaneous desire for and suspicion of the invisible has fueled invention and the imagination for centuries. In this unusual and clever book, Ball shows that our fantasies about being unseen—and seeing the unseen—reveal surprising truths about who we are.

Invisible: The History of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics

Religion & Spirituality

Islam

Arts & Photography

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Shapes: Nature's patterns: a tapestry in three parts

OUP Oxford

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Books by PHILIP BALL