Philip Ball - Four Way Interview

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and 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. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is The Book of Minds.

Why science?

As the pandemic has shown, there has never been a time when an understanding of science is essential for making informed decisions. But Covid-19 has also revealed the process of science in action, with all its uncertainties, contingencies and disagreements. We need dependable scientific reporting to help us navigate those dangerous waters.

Why this book?

Debates around AI and animal sentience have highlighted how little we know about minds different from our own, and how urgently we need to know them better. Meanwhile, understanding the origins of our own consciousness remains sketchy. Research on such issues has tended in the past to be confined to narrow academic disciplines. But increasingly now there is a dialogue between, say, research on robotics and machine intelligence, child psychology and animal cognition. This book aims to bring these strands together to weave a picture of what we currently know (and what we don’t) about the diversity of possible minds and the similarities and differences in how they work.

What’s next?

I have just completed the next book, which is called simply Life: A Manual. It attempts to change some of the narratives in how we think about biology and how life works: research over the past two decades or so has changed and advanced our knowledge substantially, and it is time to tell new stories about these old and challenging questions.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

The James Webb Space Telescope was one of the most stunning technological achievements ever in space science, and soon it should start revealing extrasolar planets in more detail than we’ve ever had before - as well as a host of other astronomical wonders.

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest free here

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