Nigel Calder, who has died aged 82, became one of Britain's most distinguished science writers during decades of almost explosive advance in all fields of global science. He was one of the founders, and for a while editor, of New Scientist, one of the world's most successful science news journals. He wrote and produced a series of BBC television spectaculars that explored this planet, the solar system, the galaxy and the universe beyond, and in the course of 50 years he wrote or edited at least 37 books.

He had a gift for economy, clarity and vividness perfectly suited to the changing needs of journalism and the increasing complexity of discovery. Although he began his career as a physicist, he understood the important vital divide between journalism and research, and even half apologised for testing a hypothesis with his own experiment, "albeit reluctantly," he said afterwards, "because I do not think science writers should dabble in research as a rule, any more than lobby correspondents should stage a coup d'etat".

Born in London, he was the eldest son of Mabel (nee McKail) and Peter Ritchie Calder. His father, a writer and former science editor of the now defunct but once influential News Chronicle, was made a life peer as Lord Ritchie-Calder in 1966. Nigel's siblings included Angus, later to become an eminent historian, and Allan, a mathematician. He was educated at the Merchant Taylors' school in Hertfordshire, and graduated from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, before beginning a brief research career at the Mullard Research Laboratories in 1954.

In 1956, however, he joined the editorial staff of the New Scientist, a small enterprise launched by Percy Cudlipp, once editor of the Daily Herald and a member of a Fleet Street dynasty, and Tom Margerison. The launch was timely: a lot was about to happen. Francis Crick and James Watson had only three years earlier deciphered the helical structure of DNA. Within a year, the Russians would put Sputnik 1 into orbit and trigger a race for the moon; within a decade, earth scientists would clinch the theory of plate tectonics, telecommunications engineers would begin to beam television news around the planet, astrophysicists would settle the argument about the birth of the universe and a British government would appoint its first formal scientific adviser.

Calder was editor of New Scientist from 1962 to 1966, but had already begun writing for wider audiences, in (among other journals) the New Statesman, displaying an enviable gift for explaining what scientists did and why they did it, in almost Orwellian English.

Like his CND-supporting father, he could also take a partisan stance. Calder was one of a number of journalists who spoke up for environmental causes in the early 1970s, and he displayed from the very beginning an affection for scientific mavericks and nay-sayers, people prepared to swim against the current. He was also quick to seize on new and provoking ideas in science, and in 1966 there were so many of these around that he quit fulltime employment to write books and television scripts.

He conceived, argued for and wrote 13 BBC and Channel 4 documentaries and series and their companion books that explored contemporary science, among them The Violent Universe (1969); The Mind of Man (1970); The Restless Earth (1972); Spaceships of the Mind (1978); Einstein's Universe (1979) and Spaceship Earth (1991). They were widely, although not uniformly, admired. Einstein's Universe was presented by the actor Peter Ustinov. "A man of such exquisite levity should not get bogged down in such gravity," said the Guardian's reviewer Nancy Banks-Smith at the time.

Calder went on writing (in a blog he described himself as "a lifelong victim of the protestant work ethic") and arguing about science almost to the end of his life. Inevitably, some of his books became dated, as the science moved on. One of them (he was to call it his "only claim to fruitful idleness") is a delightful history, The English Channel (1986), a book that grew out of his pleasure in sailing a ketch along the south coast. In one of time's ironies, that too became out of date: France and Britain that year signed the Treaty of Canterbury and started work on the Channel tunnel.

Calder was always alert for new ideas. He long ago became involved in the climate debate, reporting on and investigating both research and speculation on the potentially imminent return of the Ice Ages. In 1994, in a Guardian essay, he argued for the theory that perceived global warming (on which rested "a billion-dollar research industry") could in fact be a consequence of changes in the solar cycle. Later he backed the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark's controversial hypothesis that cosmic radiation from distant stars could be driving climate change and together the two of them delivered one of Calder's last books, The Chilling Stars, in 2007. A reviewer in Physics World dismissed it as "embarrassing bunk" but, characteristically, Calder was not discouraged.

He was at various times a consultant for the European Space Agency, a former chairman of the Association of British Science Writers and vice-president of the Cruising Association. In 1972, like his father (who won it in 1960), he was awarded the Unesco Kalinga prize for the popularisation of science.

In 1954, he married Elisabeth Palmer. She survives him, along with two sons, Simon (the travel writer) and Jonathan, three daughters, Sarah, Penny and Kate, and seven grandchildren.

• Nigel David Ritchie Calder, science writer, born 3 December 1931; died 25 June 2014