The Water Kingdom

A secret history of China – a fresh new way of thinking about a people, a civilisation, an epic story.

What a splendid idea: to write a history of China through its relationship with water. Far-fetched you might think: not in the least, as you will find immediately you start to read this fascinating book ... You will never think of China in quite the same way again.

Martin Jacques, author of WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD

In his excellent, smartly written new book, British science writer Philip Ball identifies water as "one of the most constant, significant and illuminating themes" in China's history and culture.

Ball’s journey along the history, politics and culture of China’s waterways encompasses many heroes of Chinese hydrology, men who grappled with elemental forces and imperial censure and sometimes came out on top.

The Water Kingdom presents us with an epic portrait of China’s water management history and its deep interlacing with culture currents. It’s essential reading for any serious understanding of the dynamic relations between humans and nature, not only in China, but in the world at large.

His book, a rewarding read, is at its most fascinating when describing how in China the laws of nature seems to have embedded in them a moral precept… Mr Ball puts water back beautifully at the heart of China’s story.

[A] lucid and impressive book… [A] thoughtful study.

The Water Kingdom traverses fascinating, endlessly fertile territory... There is a great deal in [the book] to inspire.

This book is fascinating and took me on a journey into a world I previously knew very little about. Take the time to immerse yourself and you will find this a rewarding read.

The language of water has been spoken in China since the earliest times. This remarkable book explains why, and is one of the very few that will be respected both in the West and in China.

Xinran, author of THE GOOD WOMEN OF CHINA and BUY ME THE SKY

[It offers] a unique window through which we can begin to grasp the overwhelming complexity and teeming energy of the country and its people.

Ball offers a compelling and evocative insight into a history still little understood in the West.

Ball’s ingenious idea is to narrate the story of China from the point of view of water… showing how profoundly the country is at the mercy of its great rivers.

Ball takes us on a fascinating and dizzying tour through Chinese myth and history.

Philip Ball writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and worked for many years as an editor for physical sciences at Nature. His books cover a wide range of scientific and cultural phenomena, and include Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another (winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books), The Music Instinct, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything, Serving The Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Science Under Hitler and Invisible: The history of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics.

Selected as a Book of the Year by The Times and The Economist 
 
China's history is an epic tapestry of courtly philosophies, warring factions and imperial intrigue. Yet, over five thousand years, one ancient element has so dramatically shaped the country's fate that it remains the key to unlocking China's story. That element is water. 
 
In The Water Kingdom Philip Ball takes us on a grand tour of China's defining element, from the rice terraces and towering karts of its battle-worn waterways, to the vast engineering projects that have struggled to contain water's wrath. What surfaces is the secret history of a people and a nation, drawn from its deep reverence for nature's most dynamic force.

The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen

Invisible

The History of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics

The invisible is one of the most enduringly seductive ideas in human history. This is its biography.

As a harvest of fascinating facts delivered with sharp wit and insight, it is hard to fault

A fascinating compendium… Another author might struggle to manage such an esoteric collection [of stories of invisibility] but Mr Ball’s writing is incisive enough to keep the different elements hanging and working together

Ball marshals his material with deftness and charm

[A] fantastic feast of ideas and information on the subject… In this enthralling book, Philip Ball’s elegant and intelligent mastery…is very evident indeed

If Ball’s voice is lost in the information, that is his aim: the unseen narrator lets the bewitching facts speak for themselves

One of the most engaging contemporary science writers… Excellent

Original and thought-provoking… The writing is crisp and often witty [and] packed with abstruse information

[Ball] is indefatigable, polymathic and conscientious… Project by project, his books are getting better

Quirky, wide-ranging… Down [Ball’s] intellectual side-roads we better understand why brilliant, otherwise rational people – Conan Doyle, Abraham Lincoln and many eminent scientists – could be seduced by the supernatural

Fantastic feast of ideas and information… Ball’s elegant and intelligent mastery of both [science and magic] is very evident indeed

If you could be invisible, what would you do? The chances are that it would have something to do with power, wealth or sex. Perhaps all three. 
 
But there's no need to feel guilty. Impulses like these have always been at the heart of our fascination with invisibility: it points to realms beyond our senses, serves as a receptacle for fears and dreams, and hints at worlds where other rules apply. Invisibility is a mighty power and a terrible curse, a sexual promise, a spiritual condition. 
 
This is a history of humanity's turbulent relationship with the invisible. It takes on the myths and morals of Plato, the occult obsessions of the Middle Ages, the trickeries and illusions of stage magic, the auras and ethers of Victorian physics, military strategies to camouflage armies and ships and the discovery of invisibly small worlds. 
 
From the medieval to the cutting-edge, fairy tales to telecommunications, from beliefs about the supernatural to the discovery of dark energy, Philip Ball reveals the universe of the invisible.

The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler

Serving the Reich

An incisive and revealing exploration of the fate of physics under the Nazis – and how scientific idealism led to accommodation with a totalitarian regime.

Ball's book shows what can happen to morality when cleverness and discovery are valued above all else

Ball does an outstanding service by reminding us how powerful and sometimes confusing the pressures were… Packed with dramatic, moving and even comical moments

A fascinating account of the moral dilemmas faced by German physicists working within Nazism. Impeccably researched

The story is intriguing for it reveals the lack of insight of many of the world’s greatest physicists

A new book from Philip Ball is always an eagerly anticipated event, but this one exceeds expectations

Ball examines sensitively the careers of three eminent physicists who continued to work in Nazi Germany, emphasising the very different ways in which each dealt (or failed to deal) with the moral dilemmas of working in an increasingly oppressive state

Asks important questions, not just about 20th-century German science but about the nature of science and the response of scientists to the political world we perforce inhabit. All scientists should read and ponder its contents

Ball’s judgements are well reasoned, nuanced and, in my view, fair

This is an exploration of morality and human dilemmas under a totalitarian regime

It is a reminder that science, however detached it wants to seem, can never be separated from society or ideology

Ball’s real interests lie elsewhere, in what he calls the ‘grey zone between complicity and resistance’. It is one of the strengths of Serving the Reich that in surveying this territory the analysis is not unduly flattering to the moral and political certainties of the present

Helps us to appreciate better the contribution of other physicists during the war

Serving the Reich tells the story of physics under Hitler. While some scientists tried to create an Aryan physics that excluded any ‘Jewish ideas’, many others made compromises and concessions as they continued to work under the Nazi regime. Among them were world-renowned physicists Max Planck, Peter Debye and Werner Heisenberg. 
 
After the war most scientists in Germany maintained they had been apolitical or even resisted the regime: Debye claimed that he had gone to America in 1940 to escape Nazi interference in his research; Heisenberg and others argued that they had deliberately delayed production of the atomic bomb. 
 
In a gripping exploration of moral choices under a totalitarian regime, here are human dilemmas, failures to take responsibility and three lives caught between the idealistic goals of science and a tyrannical ideology.

How Science Became Interested in Everything

Curiosity

A tour through the history of human curiosity, from its original condemnation as sin, blossoming through the lives of Galileo and Newton, to its current role central to modern society.

Philip Ball, like Levi, displays a polymath’s enthusiasm for knowledge of all kinds, and writes of science with humility and intelligent generosity.

Ball's fascinating book revels not just in the experiments of these early scientists, but also in their humanity, foibles and passions

A wonderfully nuanced and wise study of the scientific revolution

Philip Ball’s scintillating history of curiosity brims with treats

Cogent and intellectual… Ball has produced a great read, and there are few finer books on curiosity and mankind’s virtuous vice

There was a time when curiosity was condemned. 
 
Through curiosity, our innocence was said to be lost. Yet this hasn't deterred us. Today we spend vast sums trying to recreate the first instants of creation in particle accelerators, out of pure desire to know. There seems now to be no question too vast or too trivial. No longer reviled, curiosity is now celebrated. 
 
By examining the rise of curiosity from the dawn of modern science to today, we can examine how it functions in science, how it is spun, packaged and sold, and how the changing shape of science influences the kinds of questions it may ask.

The Heretical Idea of Making People

Unnatural

A fascinating exploration of the cultural history of the creation of artificial people - what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul.

Unnatural is a beautifully written, deeply intelligent book that will force every reader to rethink at least some of their preconceptions

The two cultures of science and art are not antagonists, divergent in their aims and mutually unintelligible: they happily cohabit inside Ball's compendious, eclectic head.

A brave, sane and intellectually nimble account of a topic which only gets more ambiguous with each scientific advance. Unnatural is fascinating and engaging, and a polemic only for cool heads and open hearts when dealing with issues of such serious and profound complexity

Meticulous, witty and sometimes provocative

Labelling Ball a science writer sells his writing short, for its value lies above all in a range that dissolves the awkward silences between science and the larger culture of which it is part.

Philip Ball presents the ethical dilemmas, ancient and modern, with intelligence and assurance

Ball's thoughtful book is a reminder that as we try and deal with how to enable and assist people into being, we need to understand and then conquer our fears surrounding the very idea of making people.

Ball's assiduously science-literature approach is very welcome

If Ball's book is an entertaining romp across centuries and genres, it also has a target...What Ball does so effectively...is to show why language and stories matter- in effect, why humanities matter

The most polymathic science writer of our time

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.

Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind

Universe of Stone

Award-winning author Philip Ball illuminates the medieval mind through a study of the greatest architectural masterpiece of the period, Chartres Cathedral.

[Ball] has a knack for translating difficult concepts into lucid prose: he offers a refreshingly sceptical guided tour of Chartres Cathedral and the intellectual contents that helped produce it

Lucid and resplendent...a model of explanatory writing

Consistently and healthily sceptical ... an intelligent, enjoyable and well-produced book which deserves a wide audience

An original and imaginative synthesis of art history and history of science

Illuminating... a masterpiece. The erudition with which Ball imparts his knowledge does nothing to diminish his sense of wonder

Philip Ball has done something extraordinary here: he's got me interested in cathedrals

In the twelfth century, Christians in Europe began to build a completely new kind of church - soaring, spacious monuments flooded with light from immense windows. These were the first Gothic churches, the crowning example of which was the cathedral of Chartres: a revolution in thought embodied in stone and glass, and a bridge between the ancient and modern worlds. 
 
In Universe of Stone, Philip Ball explains the genesis and development of the Gothic style. He argues that it signified a profound change in the social, intellectual and theological climate of Western Christendom. As the church represented nothing less than a vision of heaven on earth, this shift in architectural style marked the beginning of the argument between faith and reason which continues today, and of a scientific view of the world that threatened to dispense with God altogether.

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

The Music Instinct

Wonderful account of why music matters... one of the finest and most versatile of current non-fiction writers

Exemplary... In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also contemplating the mystery of ourselves... Ball, thankfully, doesn't try to provide any easy answers, but rather sends the reader back to the music a better listener

This is a truly fascinating and eye-opening account of a phenomenon so commonplace we barely think about it, yet one which is also mind-bogglingly complicated. Once you've read The Music Instinct, you'll never listed to music the same way again

A musical experience in itself...his love of the subject is abundantly evident.. His mastery of many scientific disciplines is a delight

Impressively engaging...it will be the rare music lover that does not come away without having learned many interesting things

Ball....proves as comfortable discussing the science of music as its cultural and artistic dimensions... This thought-provoking book answers many questions, and leaves a few hanging tantalisingly behind as well

Remarkable capacity to use words to open our ears

This book surveys current thinking and tells you why music rocks

Bestriding with equal ease the very different disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, history and neurology, the author answers com amore the questions posed in the subtitle of this important book. A remarkable achievement.

As prolific as he is profound, Philip Ball weaves science into culture with a dexterity and virtuosity that avoid any sense of overstretch... Ball can truly make scholarship sing.

Why have all human cultures - today and throughout history - made music? Why does music excite such rich emotion? 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. 
 
'You'll never listen to music the same way again' - Independent

The Music Instinct Brain Shot

BRAIN SHOT: Byte-sized survey of what is known - and what is still unknown - about how music works and why it is indispensible to humanity

A truly fascinating and eye-opening account of a phenomenon so commonplace we barely think about it, yet one which is also mind-bogglingly complicated. Once you've read The Music Instinct, you'll never listed to music the same way again

I defy anyone to read this book without coming away better informed about why music affects us in such a profound way... His passion for music is evident on every page, and his enthusiasms are infectious.

If you try listening to music after reading this book, you'll probably hear it differently - more knowingly, even

All human cultures seem to make music - today and through history. But why they do so, why music can excite deep passions, and how we make sense of musical sound at all are questions that have, until recently, remained profoundly mysterious. Now in The Music Instinct Brain Shot Philip Ball provides the first comprehensive, accessible survey of what is known - and what is still unknown - about how music works its magic, and why, as much as eating and sleeping, it seems indispensable to humanity. 
 
BRAIN SHOT: Byte-sized survey of what is known - and what is still unknown - about how music works and why it is indispensible to humanity

The Invention of Colour

Bright Earth

A brilliant exploration of the science of art and of colour

Brilliant...in every sense. Ball's book is the volume that has been missing from my library

Brings the mysterious subject of colour wonderfully alive. Quite literally an eye-opener

A succinct and elegantly structured new survey of Western painting. Ball pitches his learning just right between academic history and a highly readable series of anecdotes and biographical sketches

Full of fascinating vignettes. Philip Ball writes engagingly on complicated topics

Scattered with attractive particles, sparkles with redolent names... A solid, well-researched compendium of information

A fascinatingly different account of the history of art

A mine of information...a fascinating book about art and science that is packed with anecdotes

Bright Earth proves that many of the world's greatest artists owe a great debt to the questing colourmen behind them

Colour in art - as in life - is both inspiring and uplifting, but where does it come from? How have artists found new hues, and how have these influenced their work? Beginning with the ancients - when just a handful of pigments made up the artist's palette - and charting the discoveries and developments that have led to the many splendoured rainbow of modern paints, Bright Earth brings the story of colour spectacularly alive. Packed with anecdotes about lucky accidents and hapless misfortunes in the quests for new colours, it provides an entertaining and fascinating new perspective on the science of art.

Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

The Devil's Doctor

The first 'life and times' in over forty years of one of the most fascinating figures of scientific history, by the winner of the 2005 Aventis Science Book Prize. 
 
Brings to life the ferment of post-Reformation Europe, in the spirit of Frances Stonor Saunders' Hawkwood.

Praise for The Devil's Doctor 
Brilliant... This prodigiously learned volume can only reinforce Ball's reputation as one of our most versatile and gripping science writers. John Carey

Stirring and fascinating reading... This is a remarkable piece of work, entertaining and edifying in a way in which so few biographies are. Niall Griffiths

'This biography is a study of a culture as well as of a man, and in analysing the life and thought of Paracelsus, Ball brings to light a largely forgotten phase of human understanding. It is a considerable achievement.' Peter Ackroyd

[A] wonderfully rich biography... Inspiring and important.'

Praise for Critical Mass: 
'This is a wide-ranging and dazzlingly informed book. I can promise you'll be amazed.' Bill Bryson

Philip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim - known to later ages as Paracelsus - stands on the borderline between medieval and modern; a name that is familiar but a man who has been hard to perceive or understand. Contemporary of Luther, enemy of established medicine, scourge of the universities ('at all the German schools you cannot learn as much as at the Frankfurt Fair'), army surgeon and alchemist, myths about him - from his treating diseases from beyond the grave in mid-nineteenth century Salzburg to his Faustian bargain with the devil to regain his youth - have been far more lasting than his actual story. Even during his lifetime, he was rumoured to travel with a magical white horse and to store the elixir of life in the pommel of his sword. 
 
But who was Paracelsus and what did he really believe and practice? Although Paracelsus has been seen as both a charlatan and as a founder of modern science, Philip Ball's book reveals a more richly complex man - who used his eyes and ears to learn from nature how to heal, and who wrote influential books on medicine, surgery, alchemy and theology while living a drunken, combative, vagabond life. Above all, Ball reveals a man who was a product of his time - an age of great change in which the church was divided and the classics were rediscovered - and whose bringing together of the seemingly diverse disciplines of alchemy and biology signalled the beginning of the age of rationalism.

Critical Mass

The winner of the Aventis Prize for Science Books, this is a fascinating exploration of the age-old question: are there 'laws of nature' that guide human affairs? Is there anything inevitable about the ways humans behave and organise themselves? Do we have complete freedom in creating our societies, or are we trapped by 'human nature'?

Exquisitely produced and painstakingly researched... Ball writes patiently and eloquently.. Exciting... A rousing call-to-arms, and an elegant answer to the shallow tradition of British empiricism.

In his fascinating new book, Critical Mass, Philip Ball tells the story of this research in a comprehensive and often captivating way... Ball delves far beyond today's headlines... Impressively clear and breathtaking in scope... Substantial, impeccably researched and...persuasive. For anyone who would like to learn about the intellectual ferment at the surprising junction of physics and social science, Critical Mass is the place to start.

Lucid, accessible and engaging... Ball makes a persuasive, comprehensive case and it's a welcome antidote to popular individualistic thought.

Critical Mass fizzes with ideas and insights

more than a book, this in an intellectual curiosity

A dazzlingly informed book... I can promise you'll be amazed

Is there a 'physics of society'? Philip Ball's investigation into human nature ranges from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, across economics, sociology and psychology. Ball shows how much of human behaviour we can understand when we cease trying to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, in circumstances in which human beings both co-operate and conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive. By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply thought-provoking book, causing us to examine our own behaviour, whether in buying the new Harry Potter book, voting for a particular party or responding to the lures of advertisers.

Philip Ball

This is the book I wish I could have written, but am very glad I've read. It's an accessible, persuasive and thorough appraisal of what the most important theory in all of science actually means.

Ball is an exceptionally talented writer who manages to combine accessibility and thoroughness in razor-sharp prose

Riveting ... Ball is an intelligent guide

A deeply fascinating book … Philip Ball is a rare writer in having such depth of knowledge of a difficult field, yet retaining the critical eye of an observer. Highly recommended.

Jon Butterworth, Professor of Physics at UCL and author of SMASHING PHYSICS

Ball, a gifted and prolific science writer familiar to Prospect readers, is a demanding but engaging guide to this daunting terrain.

A subtle unpacking of Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle… is alone worth the price of the book... Ball takes us on a whirlwind tour through the quantum realm

Perfect. It is engaging and clear without feeling dumbed down. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in really understanding what quantum physics is all about

This author explains his subject simply and thoughtfully

One of the most lucid and enlightening books on the nature of the reality of the quantum world that I haver read

Times Higher Education, *Summer reads of 2019*

PHYSICS WORLD 2018 BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
‘A clear and deeply researched account of what’s known about the quantum laws of nature, and how to think about what they might really mean’ Nature 
 
 ‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’ Richard Feynman wrote this in 1965 – the year he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work on quantum mechanics. Over the past decade, the enigma of quantum mechanics has come into sharper focus. We now realise that quantum mechanics is less about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information: about what can be known and how. 
 
 The quantum world isn’t a different world: it is our world, and if anything deserves to be called ‘weird’, it’s us. This exhilarating book is about what quantum maths really means – and what it doesn’t mean. 
 
 ‘Gorgeously lucid…takes us to the edge of contemporary theorizing about the foundations of quantum mechanics… Easily the best book I’ve read on the subject’ Washington Post

Beyond Weird

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Philip Ball

Praise for Beyond Weird

This is the book I wish I could have written, but am very glad I've read. It's an accessible, persuasive and thorough appraisal of what the most important theory in all of science actually means.

Excellent.

Ball is an exceptionally talented writer who manages to combine accessibility and thoroughness in razor-sharp prose

This is the book I wish I could have written, but am very glad I've read. It's an accessible, persuasive and thorough appraisal of what the most important theory in all of science actually means.

Excellent.

Ball is an exceptionally talented writer who manages to combine accessibility and thoroughness in razor-sharp prose

This is the book I wish I could have written, but am very glad I've read. It's an accessible, persuasive and thorough appraisal of what the most important theory in all of science actually means.

Excellent.

Ball is an exceptionally talented writer who manages to combine accessibility and thoroughness in razor-sharp prose

Books by Philip Ball

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