Shahriar Sadigh Afshar (; born 1971) is an Iranian-American physicist and inventor. 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
Between 2004 and 2007, Afshar was a visiting research professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Rowan University. His highest academic degree is a Bachelor of Science He has numerous patents to his name in high-tech. He holds Iranian and American dual citizenship.

Afshar experiment 

The Afshar experiment is an optical experiment, which he claims demonstrates a contradiction of the principle of complementarity in quantum mechanics.  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, 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, that makes the immersive media KOR-fx product. In his interviews with CNN and Bloomberg TV, 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 New Scientist and in an award-winning article in Popular Science. He offered his own theory on the origin of inertia instead. With the announcement on July 4, 2012 by scientists at CERN that they had detected the Higgs boson Afshar appears to have lost the bet.

References

External links
NPR interview NPR's Science Friday
American Physical Society News (Profiles in Versatility Interview)

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