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 H 2 O: 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. His latest book is How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (2023).
Author Anany0 Bhattacharya spoke to Philip Ball about life after a cancer diagnosis, whether having a PhD informs his work, and how he writes books appreciated by scientists and non-scientists alike.
Hi Phil, How are you doing? You were recently diagnosed as having a high-risk prostate cancer. So you wrote a remarkably upbeat article in which you ruminate about and describe living things as “whirlpools of meaning.” So, to start with a nice easy question, where do you, as an atheist, find meaning in life, and has science writing deepened your appreciation for it?
I’d describe myself, a little but not entirely tongue-in-cheek, as a spiritual atheist. There’s an aspect of human experience that seems to me allied to the qualia of consciousness in that, while I’m happy to see it as arising simply from neuronal activity, it can’t be ‘reduced’ to just that, and for me, that often appears most strongly with music. There are times when music awakens in me what I can only imagine religious experience must awaken in believers. My engagement with science has clarified how I think about this, and I think it is in a humanistic way: I can see no gain in seeking to locate meaning outside of the human experience of being alive and connected with others. I’m happy to see this as an evolved trait that can be seen to degrees in other organisms, but neither can it be ‘reduced’ to evolutionary psychology.
Over a long and illustrious career, you’ve written on an astonishing array of different subjects, from quantum mechanics to the chemistry of water, from the cathedral at Chartres to our love of music and the nature of consciousness. Your most recent book looks at what cutting-edge biology is telling us about the nature of life. What, if anything, unites these disparate interests?
I suppose it is a curiosity about and delight in the diversity of what we can know about the world, and what we have done with that over time. A lot of science writing focuses on telling stories about people, and that can be wonderful. But what truly excites me are ideas and how they have evolved and how they interrelate. So, in the end, what unites these disparate interests in perhaps my eagerness to make the most of the privileged position I have as a writer to follow my own interests and to ensure that with each book, I am learning something new.
You’ve written more than a book a year for thirty years while also writing dozens of articles. How are you so incredibly productive?
By not being too precious about it. It’s a job I love, but it’s still a job – so I sit down and get on with it. On some days, the writing is dull and awkward, but so be it; I’ll try to fix that later. The good thing about working on many projects is also that if one is stalling, I can turn to another. I also appreciate the way that writing as a journalist forces you to get it done: a book deadline of a year away can easily be deferred, but when you need to turn in copy by lunchtime, it trains the mind to focus!
In the words of Brian Clegg, you’re “the most cerebral of the UK’s professional science writers”– an assessment with which I concur. You’re unafraid of delving very deeply into every subject you explore, and whenever I pick up a Phil Ball book, I know I’ll learn something new, even in fields I thought I was quite familiar with myself. Have you ever worried, though, that prevents you from reaching a bigger readership? I’d imagine a good chunk of your readers have some sort of background in science.
I have come to terms with the fact that, indeed, the way I work will limit my readership. For a while, I did sometimes find that frustrating, but now I know that what I truly want to do is not to write bestsellers but to contribute something that I hope will be useful for the discussion, whether that’s about the history of chemistry, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the appreciation of art and literature. It’s immensely gratifying to discover that scientists and other specialists seem to find the books useful. I don’t want to be reporting these discussions for non-specialists (although I try to write with them in mind), but to be part of them.
To my mind, you write the sort of books and articles that one might expect from a great academic science communicator, but you don’t (yet, at least) hold a university position. What do you think distinguishes your writing from theirs? (I’m thinking Rovelli, Penrose, Dawkins, Pinker, etc.) What, in your opinion, are the pros and cons of books by scientists who write on the side as opposed to those by full-time science writers and journalists?
All of those you name write wonderfully but have a particular theory or viewpoint to push. I think that can become a big problem with science communication from academic specialists: very often, they offer just one side of an argument and offer it as established fact. And increasingly, publishers seem to push academics to make their theory The Answer to some Big Question: cognition, consciousness, cosmology… My books present opinions and points of view, but I strive also to present some balance, to acknowledge uncertainties and caveats, and so on. I’m not interested in converting readers to My Idea, but instead want to offer them ways to think about the problem. I realise this, too, decreases my audience and media coverage!
You have a PhD in theoretical physics. Do you think that contributes to your approach to writing about science?
Often, I think it probably does. A training in physics doesn’t give one the omniscience some (including some physicists!) think it does, but I believe it encourages one – particularly in the area of physics I studied – to look for (and then to convey) the ‘physics’ of any problem: the gist of the mechanism, beneath the details and particularities. I was never an especially brilliant physicist, but I suspect that training remains valuable to me.
Apparently, you didn’t pursue a research career in part because you felt others were obviously more brilliant, at least in their chosen niches than you. Is that right? Personally, I think part of the problem with modern academia is that current career paths alienate more-rounded intellects like yourself.
That’s exactly right. Until I did my PhD at Bristol, I was used to being top of the class – at school, and even among my peer group at Oxford. Then suddenly, I had friends who saw our subject far more deeply than I knew I ever could. And far from being disheartening, it was an immense liberation – now I was free to choose what I really wanted to do! And that’s how I turned ultimately to writing. But it’s true that I also quit academia because I could otherwise see myself getting ever narrower in my focus, whereas my impulse was to go in entirely the opposite direction. And I agree that I don’t think it would have been possible to do that as a young postdoc in academia.
You’ve also written an acclaimed novel! Tell us about how that came about. How did you find writing fiction compared to non-fiction? Any plans for another novel?
The novel arose from a stash of rather bizarre material that I ‘liberated’ from Nature while I was an editor there and which would otherwise have just been thrown away. I knew there was a story to be constructed from that material, but it took me ten years to figure out how to tell it and to dare to do so. The experience of writing it was very different from writing non-fiction – I had to write the final section almost in one continuous breath, and I spent three days in a remote hut doing that. I had to find the characters and let them come alive and speak, and they often surprised me. I was taking a lot of courses in theatre at the time, and that helped immensely with character development – in fact, I first wrote the story as a short play, which enabled me to see how it went.
I do have plans for another novel, which has had a similar genesis but an even longer gestation. I don’t want to jinx it, but I have sketched out some pilot material to see if it will work and if I can find the right voice – crucial in this case because it is set in the Middle Ages. I’ll say no more for now!
Phil’s latest book “How Life Works”
Author
Ananyo Bhattacharya is a science writer who has worked at the Economist and Nature. Before journalism, he was a medical researcher at the Burnham Institute in San Diego, California. He holds a degree in physics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in protein crystallography from Imperial College London.
Editor– Roopsha Sengupta
Cover image- iStock
