Private Passions

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider – the huge particle detector buried deep underground at CERN near Geneva. He’s part of an international team of around 1,400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists studying the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics. Harry is also passionate about explaining these mysteries to the widest possible audience. He has curated two major exhibitions at the Science Museum in London – one about the Hadron Collider, another about the Sun, and his first book was called How To Make An Apple Pie from Scratch, a title which draws on a comment by the astronomer Carl Sagan: "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". His most recent book Space Oddities looks at some of the strange things – anomalies - that are currently confounding scientists, and transforming our understanding of physics.