You don't get to write a title like that every day.
Pioneering metrologist and physicist Bryan Kibble was born in Letcombe Regis, Berkshire, (now Oxfordshire), in 1938. He was the fourth and last child of a police sergeant and his wife. As a child he liked repairing bikes, watches and electrical equipment. Attending Abingdon School he went on to win a Physics scholarship to Oxford, graduating at Jesus College. After receiving his DPhil, he held a post-doctoral fellowship in Canada at the University of Windsor, Ontario.
On returning to England in 1967, aged 29, he joined the National Physical Laboratory, (NPL), in Teddington where he spent the next thirty years. During that time the Kibble Balance was developed, but with no funding made available the apparatus was sold to the National Laboratory of Canada.
During his time at the NPL Kibble lived in Warwick Close in Hampton until he "retired" in 1998. He and his wife Anne, whom he met at Oxford, and who also worked as a scientist at the NPL, travelled widely during the next sixteen years. His son Stephen said of his father:
“He had such a profound understanding of the principles of electrical metrology, he was welcomed in other countries and helped them improve their measurement capabilities”.
Away from the lab Kibble was a bit of a DIY enthusiast, and enjoyed making home improvements. Anne recalls:
“When he ran out of jobs to do, we purchased a near-derelict fisherman’s cottage in Sennen Cove, Cornwall”
“With a local builder we built an elegant three-bedroomed house under a new non-leaking roof from the previous one-bedroom cottage with sleeping accommodation in the roof. Bryan did all the decorating and fitments in keeping with the style of other houses in the Cove. Friends and family still enjoy using it.”
A keen member of NPL’s Musical Society, Kibble took clarinet lessons. He also played bowls at the NPL and for a number of years umpired one of the lab’s ladies’ hockey teams.
A plaque on his house marks his life and the success of the Kibble Balance he and fellow metrologist Ian Robinson created, which redefines the kilogram as a unit of measurement. NIST stands for the National Institute for Standards and Technology. NPL CEO Dr. Peter Thompson performed the unveiling ceremony on May 20 2019, World Metrology Day, in the front garden of Kibble's home. Although the Kibble Balance doesn’t affect everyday measurements, it has revolutionised the world of high-level measurement. Kibble’s son Stephen “explained” it in an obituary to his father when he said the discovery “will spread the responsibility for reaching the unit of mass to the countries of the world, rather than being concentrated in a single cylinder of metal kept in a laboratory in Paris”.
In case that doesn’t really help, here’s another definition of the Kibble Balance: An electromechanical measuring instrument that measures the weight of a test object very precisely by the electric current and voltage needed to produce a compensating force. It is a metrological instrument that can realize the definition of the kilogram unit of mass based on fundamental constants.
If that doesn’t do it for you, here's a photograph of the device which will make everything alright.
A thing of beauty - The NIST-4 Kibble Balance
Oh, the NIST-4 Kibble balance began full operation early 2015, measuring Planck's constant to within 13 parts per billion in 2017, which was accurate enough to assist with the 2019 redefinition of the kilogram. It is worth adding it was only a few years ago at a meeting of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Versailles that sixty countries decided to accept the Kibble Balance as a standard. Professor Terry Quinn, director of the Bureau, described the discovery as ‘a stroke of genius’ when addressing spectators at the ceremony.
Home from 1967 until his retirement in 1998
Red arrow: Kibble’s home
Blue arrow: Kibble's place of work, the NPL
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