#philip ball

[practicaluigi]

[dipnotski]

Philip Ball – Moleküller (2025)

Moleküller, maddenin dünyasını anlamamıza açılan kapıyı temsil ediyor. Philip Ball, bu kısa kitabında moleküllerin sadece kimyasal yapılar olmadığını, aynı zamanda günlük yaşamımızı şekillendiren varlıklar olduğunu gösteriyor. Kokladığımız çiçekten içtiğimiz kahveye, kullandığımız ilaçlardan giysilerimize kadar her şey, belirli moleküllerin etkisiyle varlık kazanıyor. Moleküller dünyasına giriş,…

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[averycanadianfilm]

Understanding Quantum Entanglement - with Philip Ball

[komplikacije]

"It's the same with the human brain. It is absurd to suppose that a system this complex will have a single way of developing. What used to be considered "abnormalities", such as autistic-spectrum conditions, are not aberrations (which is again not to deny the difficulties they can cause) but just possible outcomes - in this case, by no means rare ones - of the developmental process that creates a brain under the influence of a human genome. This is why the metaphor of a blueprint for life is so profoundly obstructive for understanding how life works - for it runs counter to the very principles that make life possible. It actively hinders understanding and education, but I believe it also fails on a moral level, because it compels us to regard life as a normative plan from which reality may deviate to a greater or lesser degree. On the contrary, life is a process, a literal unfolding. It is time to become impatient with the old view."

Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

[allyouknowisalie]

For we are not merely a knot of atoms. The atoms that make us are constantly being exchanged with those in the environment, replaced almost entirely every several years. Unlike a lump of rock, in which many of the same atoms have sat there locked into a crystal lattice since before the dinosaurs, we are matter in flux. What exactly is it that stays steady (if not constant) over our lives? The best we can currently say is that we—each of us as individuals—are self-sustaining patterns that become imposed on matter. There’s no shortage of non-living analogues of structures that are temporarily sustained and organized while matter and energy flow through them: hurricanes and whirlwinds, say. We too are spinning patterns of organization. ... Our patterns interact and exchange: There is information flow between them. Once we cease clinging to our materiality, as if we were hewn from rock, we can see how there is a genuine spreading-out of the pattern and organization that make us. Some of the patterns in my brain have been set in place by the whirlwinds of meaning who are my family. We are leaky patterns, imprinting onto one another. When I am moved to tears by a Bach prelude, it is not because of some mysterious power of the acoustic vibrations; it is, it can only be, because there is some Bachness preserved in that pattern, some Bach-meaning encoded in the matter of the world.

A New Way of Thinking About Cancer, Life, the Power of Genes, and DNA, from Philip Ball, Author of How Life Works

[tetw]

20 Great Articles by Philip Ball

He's one of the best science writers around -- he seems to be interested in everything and has an amazing ability to make any subject fascinating. Click through for 20 of Philip Ball's best articles from around the net.

[kitchen-light]

[Ghosts are] the invisible police, all-seeing agents that patrol norms and boundaries. In this respect traditional ghosts are not emissaries of chaos, but are, on the contrary, social conservatives.

Philip Ball, from “Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen”, The Bodley Head, 2004

[averycanadianfilm]

Imperialism’s long shadow: the UK universities grappling with a colonial past

Many research institutions in the United Kingdom gained prominence as the British Empire reached its zenith — bringing them a painful reckoning as they attempt to decolonize.

Whatever the eventual outcome, the fractious debate about how to deal with the cultural and institutional legacies of racism and colonialism will surely continue.