) , image = , image_size = , caption = , birth_name = Shahriar Sadigh Afshar , birth_date = , birth_place =

Tehran Tehran (; fa, تهران ) is the largest city in Tehran Province and the capital of Iran. With a population of around 9 million in the city and around 16 million in the larger metropolitan area of Greater Tehran, Tehran is the most popul ...

Imperial State of Iran Imperial is that which relates to an empire, emperor, or imperialism. Imperial or The Imperial may also refer to: Places United States * Imperial, California * Imperial, Missouri * Imperial, Nebraska * Imperial, Pennsylvania * Imperial, T ...

, citizenship =

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

& American , nationality = , ethnicity = , fields =

Physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

, Inventor and

Entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

From A Physics Rebel Shakes Up the Video Game World, Literally
Oct 27, 2009; , workplaces =

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

,From A Physics Rebel Shakes Up the Video Game World, Literally
Oct 27, 2009;

Rowan University Rowan University is a public research university in Glassboro, New Jersey, with a medical campus in Stratford and medical and academic campuses in Camden. It was founded in 1923 as Glassboro Normal School on a site donated by 107 residents. ...

, Institute for Radiation-Induced Mass Studies (IRIMS),

Perimeter Institute Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI, Perimeter, PITP) is an independent research centre in foundational theoretical physics located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 1999. The institute's founding and major benefactor i ...

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

, alma_mater = , known_for = Afshar experiment, KOR-fx, SoundKix, acousto-haptics , awards =

Khwarizmi International Award The Khwarizmi International Award is a research award given annually by the President of Iran. The awardees, 10 senior researchers and 10 young researchers, are selected by the Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology (IROST). It h ...

1989, Popular Science Invention of the Year 2010,
CES Innovations Award 2013 ,

Digital Trends Digital Trends is a Portland, Oregon-based tech news, lifestyle, and information website that publishes news, reviews, guides, how-to articles, descriptive videos and podcasts about technology and consumer electronics products. With offices i ...

Best of CES Award 2014 , footnotes = Shahriar Sadigh Afshar ( fa, شهريار صديق افشار ; born 1971) is an Iranian-American

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

and multiple award-winning inventor.An accessory that makes you feel - literally - like you're in the videogame you're playing
By Gregory Mone . May 10, 2010. He is known for devising and carrying out the Afshar experiment while at the private, Boston-based Institute for Radiation-Induced Mass Studies (IRIMS). The results were presented at a Harvard seminar in March 2004.

Biography

Since July 2004, Afshar has been a Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at

. His highest academic degree is a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

He has numerous patents to his name in high-tech. In 2014 Afshar was ranked as the 8th smartest person alive by Super Scholar. He holds Iranian and American

dual citizenship Multiple/dual citizenship (or multiple/dual nationality) is a legal status in which a person is concurrently regarded as a national or citizen of more than one country under the laws of those countries. Conceptually, citizenship is focused on ...

Afshar experiment

The Afshar experiment is an

optical Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultravio ...

experiment An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into Causality, cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome oc ...

, which he claims demonstrates a contradiction of the

principle of complementarity In physics, complementarity is a conceptual aspect of quantum mechanics that Niels Bohr regarded as an essential feature of the theory. The complementarity principle holds that objects have certain pairs of complementary properties which cannot al ...

quantum mechanics Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistr ...

. As a result of the controversy surrounding claims made about the experiment, Afshar complained that he had been attacked over his religion and ethnicity. These personal attacks drew a rebuke in an editorial in the ''

New Scientist ''New Scientist'' is a magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organisation publish ...

'', which called them "extreme" and an "entirely wrong kind of conflict".

Business career

More recently Afshar is President, CEO and CTO of Immerz Inc, a startup in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

, that makes the immersive media KOR-fx product. In his interviews with

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...

and

Bloomberg TV Bloomberg Television (on-air as Bloomberg) is an American-based pay television network focusing on business and capital market programming, owned by Bloomberg L.P. It is distributed globally, reaching over 310 million homes worldwide. It is hea ...

, it has been called " 4D technology", as a follow on to the recent success of 3D entertainment.

Higgs Boson publicity

On November 18, 2009, on the eve of Large Hadron Collider's launch, Afshar announced a wager in which he bet against LHC's finding the Higgs boson, also known as "the God particle," in a commentary in the ''

'' and in an award-winning article in '' Popular Science''. He offered his own theory on the origin of

inertia Inertia is the idea that an object will continue its current motion until some force causes its speed or direction to change. The term is properly understood as shorthand for "the principle of inertia" as described by Newton in his first law ...

instead. With the announcement on July 4, 2012 by scientists at CERN that they had detected the Higgs boson Afshar appeared to have lost the bet. The evidence at the

European Organization for Nuclear Research The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

(CERN) suggests the existence of the Higgs, but few reputable physicists have called it completely dispositive as of January 2013. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, is among those withholding affirmation of this research. Dr. Heuer called the discovery "a historic milestone." However he and others said that it was too soon to know for sure, whether the new particle is the one predicted by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half-century, and it will take further work to determine the accuracy.The Standard Model
CERN, 2015

References

External links

NPR interview

NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...

Science Friday ''Science Friday'' (known as ''SciFri'' for short) is a weekly call-in talk show that broadcasts each Friday on public radio stations, distributed by WNYC Studios, and carried on over 400 public radio stations. ''SciFri'' is hosted by award-wi ...

* American Physical Society New
(Profiles in Versatility Interview)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Afshar, Shahriar Iranian expatriate academics Iranian emigrants to the United States 21st-century American physicists Experimental physicists Living people Harvard University alumni Harvard University faculty 1971 births Theoretical physicists People from West Azerbaijan Province Rowan University faculty American chief executives of manufacturing companies 21st-century American inventors Chief technology officers