Jeffrey Goldstone
Encyclopedia
Jeffrey Goldstone is a British
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

-born theoretical physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 and an emeritus physics faculty at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics
MIT Center for Theoretical Physics
MIT Center for Theoretical Physics is a subdivision of MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics. Current research areas in the center include particle physics, string theory, nuclear physics, lattice QCD, cosmology and quantum computing...

.

He worked at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 until 1977.

He is famous for the discovery of the Nambu-Goldstone boson.

He is currently working on quantum computation.

Biography

He was educated at Manchester Grammar School
Manchester Grammar School
The Manchester Grammar School is the largest independent day school for boys in the UK . It is based in Manchester, England...

 and Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...

, (B.A. 1954, Ph.D. 1958). He worked on the theory of nuclear matter under the guidance of Hans Bethe
Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and...

, and developed modifications of Feynman diagrams for non-relativistic many-fermion systems, which are currently referred to as Goldstone diagrams.

Goldstone was a research fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...

, from 1956–60 and held visiting research posts at Copenhagen, CERN
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

 and Harvard. During this time, his research focus shifted to particle physics and he investigated the nature of relativistic field theories with spontaneously broken symmetries. With Abdus Salam
Abdus Salam
Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk (Urdu: محمد عبد السلام, pronounced , (January 29, 1926– November 21, 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the electroweak unification of the...

 and Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....

, he proved that in such theories zero-mass particles (Nambu-Goldstone bosons) must exist.

From 1962 to 1976, Goldstone was a faculty member at Cambridge. In the early 1970s, with Peter Goddard, Claudio Rebbi and Charles Thorn
Charles Thorn
Charles Thorn is a Professor of Physics at University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He played an important role in the development of Dual Models and string theory. Among his contributions is the proof of the non-existence of ghosts in string theory. The Goddard–Thorn theorem is a...

, he worked out the light-cone quantization theory of relativistic strings. He moved to the USA in 1977 as Professor of Physics at MIT, where he has been the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics since 1983 and was Director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics from 1983-89.

Goldstone published research on solitons in quantum field theory with Roman Jackiw
Roman Jackiw
Roman W. Jackiw is a theoretical physicist and Dirac Medallist. Born in Poland, Jackiw received his PhD from Cornell University in 1966 under Hans Bethe and Kenneth Wilson...

 and Frank Wilczek
Frank Wilczek
Frank Anthony Wilczek is a theoretical physicist from the United States and a Nobel laureate. He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ....

, and on the quantum strong law of large numbers with Edward Farhi and Samuel Gutmann. Since 1997, he has been working, with Farhi, Gutmann, Michael Sipser and Andrew Childs, on quantum computation algorithms.

Awards and honors

  • Fellow of the Royal Society
    Royal Society
    The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...

     (elected 1977),
  • Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
    American Academy of Arts and Sciences
    The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

     (1977),
  • Fellow of the American Physical Society
    American Physical Society
    The American Physical Society is the world's second largest organization of physicists, behind the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than 20...

     (1987).
  • Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
    Trinity College, Cambridge
    Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...

     (2000).
  • Dannie Heineman
    Dannie Heineman
    Dannie N. Heineman was a Belgian-American engineer and businessman. He was the managing director and controling shareholder of the Belgian industrial multinational Sofina. He was a prolific sponsor of science especially through Heineman Foundation in medical sciences and awards in mathematical...

     Prize of the American Physical Society (1981) "For his contribution to nuclear physics, condensed matter physics and to quantum field theory, in establishing the first rigorous diagrammatic technique for the many-body problem and in proving a fundamental theorem on spontaneously broken global symmetry."
  • Guthrie Medal of the Institute of Physics
    Institute of Physics
    The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of around 40,000....

     (London) (1983)
  • Dirac
    Paul Dirac
    Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics...

    Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics (Trieste).
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