Jim Baggott

He gave up a tenured lectureship at the University of Reading after five years in order to gain experience in the commercial world. He worked for Shell International Petroleum for 11 years before leaving to establish his own business consultancy and training practice. He won the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Marlow Medal for his contributions to scientific research in 1989.

Jim writes about science, science history and philosophy in what spare time he can find, and has published articles and book reviews in Aeon Magazine, Prospect, New Scientist, Nature, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Chemistry in Britain, Chemistry Review, The Times Higher Education Supplement, and other periodicals. His feature article on the discovery of buckminsterfullerene won the prestigious Glaxo Science Writers’ Award in 1992.

His books have been highly acclaimed and include A Beginners Guide to Reality (2005), Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb (2009), The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (2011), Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ (2012), Farewell to Reality: How Fairy-tale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth (2013), Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation (2015), and Mass: The Quest to Understand Matter from Greek Atoms to Quantum Fields (2017). His latest book, titled Quantum Space: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Search for the Structure of Space, Time, and the Universe, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.