Jeffrey Goldstone (born 3.09.1933) is an English theoretical physicist and a Fellow of the Royal Society (1977). He graduated from the University of Cambridge (1956), where he worked. From 1977 he has been professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His work is in quantum field theory, the theory of elementary particles and mathematical physics. In 1961 he put forward the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking, introduced a hypothetical massless particle (the Goldstone boson) and formulated (1961) a theorem important for determining the type of symmetry breaking (Goldstone's theorem), and gave (1962), independently of A. Salam and S. Weinberg, its general mathematical proof.