Harry Cliff

He studied at the University of Cambridge, receiving a BA (Hons) and an MSci in 2008 and a PhD in high energy physics in 2012.⁠[1]

From 2012 to 2018 he held a joint post between Cambridge and the Science Museum in London, curating two major exhibitions, Collider (2013) and The Sun (2018).⁠[2]

The Collider exhibition let visitors to London’s Science Museum take a simulated tour of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, running until May 6, 2014. Cliff, a curator, said the goal was to give visitors a genuine appreciation for what the LHC is.⁠[3]

He served as lead curator and head of content; the exhibition drew more than 650,000 visitors before touring France, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, and he received the Institute of Physics High Energy and Particle Physics Science in Society Prize for it.⁠[4]

In December 2015 he gave the talk “Have we reached the end of physics?” at TEDGlobal>Geneva, discussing the possibility that we may never be able to explain all the weird features of nature.⁠[5]

The Sun: Living With Our Star, which he helped curate, ran at the Science Museum from October 6, 2018, to May 6, 2019, charting humankind’s dependence on and changing understanding of our local fusion reactor.⁠[6]

On April 29, 2020, he appeared as the guest of episode 92 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing the LHC and particle physics, the history of particle physics, the Higgs particle, beauty quarks, matter and antimatter, future colliders and science communication.⁠[7]

On August 10, 2021, Doubleday published his first popular science book, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch (400 pages). A review said he draws readers into the world inside the atom and explains the Standard Model with clear knowledge of physics, a storyteller’s instincts and humor.⁠[8]

On October 19, 2021, Cambridge announced a new LHCb measurement of two beauty-quark decays in which decays to muons happened only about 70% as often as decays to electrons, a deviation of about 2 sigma. Cliff said that seeing the same effect as colleagues had in March boosted the chances of discovering something new.⁠[9]

On December 20, 2022, LHCb released a simultaneous measurement of RK and RK* using its full Run 1 and Run 2 data, agreeing with the Standard Model at the level of 0.2 standard deviations and superseding earlier results that had suggested a breaking of lepton universality.⁠[10]

Cliff later explained that the team gradually realized a background process was biasing the earlier results and worked to publish a corrected result the community could trust.⁠[11]

In October 2023 the Institute of Physics awarded him the Lise Meitner Medal and Prize for public engagement through exhibitions, festivals, talks, magazine articles and a popular science book, calling it an exceptional record of growing public understanding of physics.⁠[12]

On March 26, 2024, his second book, Space Oddities (288 pages), was published; it examines recent anomalies that existing theories cannot explain, such as ultra-high-energy particles from beneath the Antarctic ice and unknown forces tugging on the building blocks of matter, asking whether they signal new physics or tricks of the data.⁠[13]

He is an Assistant Professor in Experimental High Energy Physics at Cambridge, an Ernest Rutherford Fellow and Rare Decays Physics Convener for the LHCb Collaboration; he is also the Cavendish Laboratory’s Public Physicist, responsible for redeveloping the Cavendish Museum and managing its collection of historic instruments, and edits the laboratory’s annual magazine, CavMag.⁠[14]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.harrycliff.co.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/harryvcliff (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbgme1XF_U51KPbwCrL-XQQ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

University of Cambridge: Official website: https://www.cam.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[14]

Science Museum: Official website: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]