Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including 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. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many
What with multiverses and metaverses, you just can't move for verses at the moment (amusingly, the 'verse' part essentially refers to a turn, which makes no sense in either case). 'Multiverse' as a concept was always going to be a trifle confusing, as 'universe' is supposed to refer to everything in existence, but as we will see, there are plenty of different ways, both philosophically and physically, that the term is applied to something beyond the familiar, four dimensional universe. Paul Halpern packs plenty into this book - in order to put the various kinds of multiverse concept into context he pretty much goes through quantum physics, Big Bang cosmology and string theory (plus a touch of loop quantum gravity) in a fair amount of detail. We see how the most straightforward multiverse concept of a series of bubble universes in the same normal spacetime has been used to explain the fine tuning of the universe or is put forward as a consequence of the conte