Gary William Gibbons (born 1 July 1946) is a British

theoretical physicist Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experime ...

Education

Gibbons was born in

Coulsdon Coulsdon (, traditionally pronounced ) is a town in south London, England, within the London Borough of Croydon, in the ceremonial county of Greater London since 1965. Prior to this it was part of the historic county of Surrey. History The loc ...

, Surrey. He was educated at Purley County Grammar School and the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

, where in 1969 he became a research student under the supervision of

Dennis Sciama Dennis William Siahou Sciama, (; 18 November 1926 – 18/19 December 1999) was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. He was the PhD ...

. When Sciama moved to the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, he became a student of Stephen Hawking, obtaining his PhD from Cambridge in 1973.

Career and research

Apart from a stay at the

Max Planck Institute Max or MAX may refer to: Animals * Max (dog) (1983–2013), at one time purported to be the world's oldest living dog * Max (English Springer Spaniel), the first pet dog to win the PDSA Order of Merit (animal equivalent of OBE) * Max (gorilla) ...

in Munich in the 1970s he has remained in Cambridge throughout his career, becoming a full professor in 1997, a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathemat ...

in 1999, and a Fellow of

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

in 2002. Having worked on classical general relativity for his PhD thesis, Gibbons focused on the quantum theory of black holes afterwards. Together with Malcolm Perry, he used thermal

Green's function In mathematics, a Green's function is the impulse response of an inhomogeneous linear differential operator defined on a domain with specified initial conditions or boundary conditions. This means that if \operatorname is the linear differenti ...

s to prove the universality of thermodynamic properties of horizons, including cosmological event horizons. He developed the Euclidean approach to quantum gravity with Stephen Hawking, which allows a derivation of the thermodynamics of black holes from a

functional integral Functional integration is a collection of results in mathematics and physics where the domain of an integral is no longer a region of space, but a space of functions. Functional integrals arise in probability, in the study of partial differentia ...

approach. As the

Euclid Euclid (; grc-gre, Εὐκλείδης; BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the '' Elements'' treatise, which established the foundations of ...

ean action for gravity is not positive definite, the integral only converges when a particular contour is used for conformal factors. His work in more recent years includes contributions to research on

supergravity In theoretical physics, supergravity (supergravity theory; SUGRA for short) is a modern field theory that combines the principles of supersymmetry and general relativity; this is in contrast to non-gravitational supersymmetric theories such as ...

, p-branes and

M-theory M-theory is a theory in physics that unifies all consistent versions of superstring theory. Edward Witten first conjectured the existence of such a theory at a string theory conference at the University of Southern California in 1995. Witten's ...

, mainly motivated by string theory. Gibbons remains interested in geometrical problems of all sorts which have applications to physics.

Awards and honours

Gibbons was elected a

(FRS) in 1999. His nomination reads

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gibbons, Gary Alumni of St Catharine's College, Cambridge Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge English physicists Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge Living people Cambridge mathematicians British string theorists 1946 births