Philip Ball: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the sauce in Philip Ball, the secret sauce? I’d hesitate to put it that way when so many of my peers do such a fantastic job. I think for me, what it is, is that I have this extremely privileged position of being able to choose a topic and spend two, three, however many years really digging into it. I’ve always felt, given that opportunity, I really want to make the best use of it that I can. I want to continually be finding out about new topics, to take that opportunity to discover something entirely new. There are some writers — not just in science — who decide, “This is going to be my area. I’m going to become a specialist in this area. I’m going to become known for writing about this topic.” That’s fine if you clearly want to do that, but for me, it’s just such a wonderful opportunity to express and give free rein to my curiosity, to find out about these new topics. They pop up. They suggest themselves. I would never have imagined myself way back when, working for Nature, writing a book about Gothic cathedrals. That presented itself in one way or another. The more I started looking into it, the more I thought, “There’s a story here, and it’s a story that I haven’t really seen told, a story about how the cathedrals were built in connection with an emerging new view of the cosmos, a new view of how the world worked in the Middle Ages. ” That’s the kind of thing that I look for. I’m waiting for the penny to drop of “Aha. I can see something new in here, and this is an area that I’m going to be enriched by spending two or three years finding out about.” Before I pose my last question, just again, your latest book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Final query: What will you do next?…

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