[1] He is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine[2] and a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and BBC Future.
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.
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's Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another won the 2005 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.
Ball's article "Should scientists run the country"[19] won the 2022 award from the Association of British Science Writers for the best opinion piece.