Philip Ball

Philip Ball discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster and worked previously for over 20 years as an editor for Nature. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has authored many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and the wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Philip is a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science, and is the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy or social functions of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford, and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. His latest book is The Book of Minds (2022), a survey of the varieties of mind that do and might exist. Find out more at www.philipball.co.uk.

1. Our genome is not a blueprint for us https://aeon.co/essays/our-genome-is-not-a-blueprint-for-making-humans-at-all

2. Emmy Noether https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxmDphojQUU

3. Glenn Branca https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/14/glenn-branca-dead-guitarist-composer

4. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/07/17/paradise-in-a-dream/

5. What mercury feels like https://www.quora.com/What-does-mercury-feel-like

6. The deceptive cadence https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/beatles-blog/the-beatles-use-of-deceptive-cadences

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