Sir Tom Kibble obituary
Sir Tom Kibble, who has died aged 83, was one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists and, with the Nobel laureate Peter Higgs, discoverer of the "Higgs-Kibble mechanism" for giving mass to the fundamental particles of the universe. Kibble's specific contribution to this breakthrough, half a century ago, underpinned Nobel physics prizes on at least three occasions, although he never attained this singular honour himself. But he had a distinguished career in research that has applications to all scales of size and temperature: from the microscopic constituent particles that seed matter to the large-scale structure of the entire cosmos, and from near the absolute zero of temperature to the searing heat of the hot big-bang.
He was born in Madras (now Chennai), India, the son of missionaries, Walter and Janet (nee Bannerman). In 1944, Tom went as a boarder to Melville college, Edinburgh. He entered Edinburgh University as an undergraduate in 1951, and remained there until his PhD in 1958. After a year at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology), as a Commonwealth fund fellow, in 1959 he joined the theoretical physics department at Imperial College London, newly formed under Abdus Salam. Five years later, Kibble would be at the centre of an annus mirabilis in the department.
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