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, this title shows how much we can understand of human behaviour when we cease to try to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals.

In 'The Music Instinct' Philip Ball provides a 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.

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". This title argues that these old tales and myths are alive and well, subtly manipulating the current debates about assisted conception, embryo research and human cloning.

By examining the rise of curiosity from the dawn of modern science to today, this book examines 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.

This Very Short Introduction is an exciting and non-traditional approach to understanding the terminology, properties, and classification of chemical elements. It traces the history and cultural impact of the elements on humankind, and examines why people have long sought to identify the substances around them. The book includes chapters on particular elements such as gold, iron, and oxygen, showing how they shaped culture and technology. Looking beyond the Periodic Table, the author examines our relationship with matter, from the uncomplicated vision of the Greek philosophers, who believed...

The processes in a single living cell are akin to that of a city teeming with molecular inhabitants that move, communicate, cooperate, and compete. This book explores the role of the molecule in and around us, and how this molecular dynamism is being captured in the laboratory, to reinvent chemistry as the central creative science of the century.

For centuries, scientists have struggled to understand the origins of the patterns and forms found in nature. Now, in this lucid and accessibly written book, Philip Ball applies state-of-the-art scientific understanding from the fields of biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and mathematics to these ancient mysteries, revealing how nature's seemingly complex patterns originate in simple physical laws. Tracing the history of scientific thought about natural patterns, Ball shows how common presumptions--for example, that complex form must be guided by some intelligence or that form always...

As part of a trilogy of books exploring the science of patterns in nature, acclaimed science writer Philip Ball here looks at the form and growth of branching networks in the natural world, and what we can learn from them.
Many patterns in nature show a branching form - trees, river deltas, blood vessels, lightning, the cracks that form in the glazing of pots. These networks share a peculiar geometry, finding a compromise between disorder and determinism, though some, like the hexagonal snowflake or the stones of the Devil's Causeway fall into a rigidly ordered structure. Branching...

'Serving the Reich' tells the story of three world-renowned physicists working under Hitler against the background of the attempt by Nazi scientists to create 'German physics' - an Aryan science that excluded any 'Jewish ideas', in particular Einstein's theory of relativity.