Shahriar Sadigh Afshar (Persian: شهريار صديق افشار ) (born 1971) is an Iranian-American physicist and a multiple award-winning inventor. He is known for devising and carrying out the Afshar experiment at Harvard University in 2004. Since July 2004, Afshar has been a Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rowan University. His highest academic degree is B.S. He is a member of the high IQ society Mensa International.
Afshar's experiment is an optical experiment, which is claimed to demonstrate 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 has 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".
More recently Afshar has been concentrating on his commercial interests, as President, CEO and CTO of Immerz Inc, a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the consumer electronics games field. His award-winning invention, KOR-fx, is considered to be the next step towards full media immersion, and 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.
On November 18, 2009, on the eve of Large Hadron Collider's launch, Afshar announced a wager against LHC being able to find the Higgs boson in a commentary in the New Scientist and in an award article in Popular Science offering instead his own theory on the origin of inertia. The discovery of the Higgs boson was announced on July 4, 2012, by scientists at CERN, which leaves Afshar on the losing side of the Higgs bet. Actually, the evidence at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) suggests the existence of the Higgs, but few reputable physicists have called it completely dispositive as of January 2013 – certainly, the Director of CERN has not. "Towards the middle of the year, we will be there", said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, the multinational research center near Geneva in Switzerland. The agency is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the immense particle accelerator that produced the new data by colliding protons. The findings were announced by two separate teams. Dr. Heuer called the discovery "a historic milestone." He and others said that it was too soon to know for sure, however, whether the new particle is the one predicted by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half-century.