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Jim Baggott is a freelance science writer. He gained a B.Sc. (1978) in chemistry at the University of Manchester and completed a D.Phil. (1981) at Oxford University. He worked as a postgraduate research fellow at Oxford and at Stanford University in California, returning to England to take up a lectureship in chemistry at the University of Reading. After five years of academic life, he decided on a complete change of career and worked in the oil industry for 11 years before setting up his own independent business consultancy and training practice. He maintains a broad interest in science, philosophy, and history, and writes on these subjects in what spare time he can find. He was awarded the Marlow Medal by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1989 and a Glaxo Science Writer’s prize in 1992. His book Mass: The Quest to Understand Matter from Greek Atoms to Quantum Fields, won the ‘Cosmos’ Prize for Science Writing in 2020. His latest book, Discordance: The Troubled History of the Hubble Constant, was published in the UK in October 2025 and in the US in January 2026.