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Australian Book Retailer of the Year 2021
Philip Ball
Drawing on recent discoveries and insights, How Life Works outlines a new vision of our understanding of life for the 21st century.
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"Bold and intriguing."--Wall Street Journal - "Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) - "Offers plenty of food for thought."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Ball's marvelous book is…
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Featuring two hundred color plates, this history of the craft of scientific inquiry is as exquisite as the experiments it documents.
This illustrated history of experimental science is more than…
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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.
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Prize-winning science writer Philip Ball explores the diversity of thinking minds, from the variety of human minds to those of mammals, insects, computers and plants, in a book that brilliantly…
The first fully illustrated history of the chemical elements.
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In The Water Kingdom, renowned writer Philip Ball offers an epic and powerful new way of thinking about Chinese civilization.
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Originally published by The Bodley Head, 2018 –Title page verso.
One of the four elements of classical antiquity, water is central to the environment of our planet. In this book, the author writes of water’s origins, history, and unique physical…
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…
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…
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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…
Chemists have created superconducting ceramics for brain scanners, designed liquid crystal flat screens for televisions and watch displays, and made fabrics that change color while you wear them. This book…
Originally published by Bodley Head, 2012.
There was a time when curiosity was condemned. Today curiosity is no longer reviled, but celebrated. Examining how our inquisitive impulse first became sanctioned, changing from a vice to a…
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…
Originally published by Bodley Head, 2013 –Title-page verso.
The author 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…
Original publication and copyright date: 2010.
Ball offers an architectural biography of the magnificent Chartres cathedral, a revolution in thought embodied in stone and glass, and the greatest conjunction of religion, science, and technology in Western…
This book proposes that the complex systems view of social sciences has matured sufficiently to make it possible, desirable and perhaps essential to try formulating a unified scheme for studying…
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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. Impulses like these…
The bestselling author of Critical Mass offers a cutting-edge examination of what it means to be human in the face of the latest technical developments and research in cell biology…
Why do similar patterns appear in nature in settings that seem to bear no relation to one another? Nature commonly weaves its tapestry by self-organization, employing no master plan or…
Ball shows how much can be understood of human behavior when we cease to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions–whether…
From Egyptian wall paintings to the Venetian Renaissance, impressionism to digital images, Philip Ball tells the fascinating story of how art, chemistry, and technology have interacted throughout the ages to…
Introduces an area of scientific research: materials science. This book describes how scientists are inventing materials, ranging from synthetic skin, blood, and bone to substances that repair themselves and adapt…
Philip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim - known to later ages as Paracelsus - stands on the borderline between medieval and modern;
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A cutting-edge examination of what it means to be human and to have a ‘self’ in the face of new scientific developments in genetic editing, cloning and neural downloading.
From water, air, and fire to tennessine and oganesson, celebrated science writer Philip Ball leads us through the full sweep of the field of chemistry in this exquisitely illustrated history…
The compelling story of leading physicists in Germany--including Peter Debye, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg--and how they accommodated themselves to working within the Nazi state in the 1930s and '40s…
Is there a ‘physics of society’? Ranging from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, and across economics, sociology and psychology, Philip Ball shows…
Though at first glance the natural world may appear overwhelming in its diversity and complexity, there are regularities running through it, from the hexagons of a honeycomb to the spirals…
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This book aims to stimulate the reader to think anew about some of the relationships and differences between science and art, and to challenge some of the common notions about…
Discusses ‘colour in art’, its inception, the progress made, and its influences on art.
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? This…
With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley to The War of the…
The brilliantly told and gripping story of the most familiar - yet, amazingly, still poorly understood - substance in the universe: Water.
An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means-and what it doesn’t.
A Military history of the 1793-95 campaign in Flanders and the Netherlands.
