报告题目：Water in cell and molecular biology: a unique matrix of life?

报告人：Philip Ball博士（Nature杂志编辑部）

报告时间： 2018年4月10日（周二）下午14:00

报告地点：嘉定园区学术活动中心307房间

报告人简介：

Philip Ball (born 1962) is a British science writer. For over twenty years he has been an editor of the journal Nature for which he continues to write regularly. He now writes a regular column in Chemistry World. He has contributed to publications ranging from New Scientist to the New York Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times and New Statesman. He is the regular contributor to Prospect magazine, and also a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials and BBC Future. He has broadcast on many occasions on radio and TV, and in June 2004 he presented a three-part serial on nanotechnology, Small Worlds, on BBC Radio 4.

Ball's most popular book is the 2004 Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. It examines a wide range of topics including the business cycle, random walks, phase transitions, bifurcation theory, traffic flow, Zipf's law, Small world phenomenon, catastrophe theory, the Prisoner's dilemma. The overall theme is one of applying modern mathematical models to social and economic phenomena.

In 2011, he wrote The Music Instinct in which he discusses how we make sense of sound and how music entices us. He outlines what is known and still unknown about how music has such an emotional impact, and why it seems indispensable to humanity. He has since argued that music is emotively powerful due to its ability to mimic humans and through setting up expectations in pitch and harmony and then violating them.

Ball holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a doctorate in physics from Bristol University. As of 2008 he lived in London.