Title: Nature’s patterns : Dr Philip Ball
Location: The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2009-03-10
End Time: 20:30

Why do the stripes of a zebra look like wind-blown ripples in desert sand? Or the hexagons of the Giant’s Causeway resemble the honeycomb meshes of foams and the delicate skeletons of microscopic sea creatures? These things are not pure coincidence.

Philip Ball explains where nature’s spontaneous patterns come from and why the same patterns seem to appear in places that apparently share nothing in common. From snowflakes to sand dunes to eddies in rivers, these natural patterns can be created from just a few simple rules.

Philip Ball is a freelance science writer and a Consultant Editor for Nature. He worked as an editor for physical sciences at Nature for over ten years, where his brief extended from biochemistry to quantum physics and materials science.Philip is the author of several scientific books for the lay reader, including H2O: A Biography of Water (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award); and Critical Mass (winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize).

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