Kibble at 80
Imperial marks pioneering physicist Tom Kibble's 80th birthday with a guest lecture from Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg. The latest announcement from CERN cementing the discovery of a Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) represents a major milestone for particle physics and could herald a Nobel Prize for the scientists who originally hypothesised its existence and mechanism back in the 1960s. That work is often credited to six physicists including our own Emeritus Professor Tom Kibble, potentially giving the Nobel judging committee - who can only credit a maximum of three people - quite a headache. Professor Kibble, who is very much still active at Imperial, recently celebrated his 80th birthday, which was marked by the College on 13 March with a symposium day , then evening public lecture with Professor Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate himself for work on the interactions of fundamental forces, is a friend and one-time Colleague of Professor Kibble's. He spent a year at Imperial in the Theoretical Physics Group in 1961 working with Professor Kibble and the group's founder Professor Abdus Salam. As Professor Weinberg explained it was a particularly exciting time for particle physics, as scientists in the field were breaking ground through the discovery of symmetries at the at the very smallest scale of matter and energy.
