Shahriar S. Afshar (Persian: شهريار صديق افشار ) (born 1971) is an Iranian physicist and an award-winning inventor. He is known for devising and carrying out the Afshar experiment at Harvard University in 2004. As of July 2004, Afshar is a Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rowan University. His highest academic degree is B.S.
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 has been attacked over his religion and ethnicity. These personal attacks drew a rebuke in a New Scientist editorial, which called them “extreme”, and an “entirely wrong kind of conflict”.
More recently Afshar has been concentrating on his commercial interests, as President, CEO & CTO of Immerz Inc, a Cambridge MA startup, in the consumer electronics games field.
On November 18, 2009, on the eve of LHC‘s launch, Afshar announced a wager against LHC being able to find the Higgs Boson in a New Scientist commentary, offering instead his proposed theory on the origin of inertia delineated in a 1999 paper.