[1][2] He went to high school in Winnipeg and financed his own college education by working during summers and wheat harvests on Mennonite farms in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas.
[1][3] From 1947 to 1948, he held the position of Assistant to the Chief of the Scientific Branch of the United States Department of War's General Staff in Washington, D.C.[1][2][3] From 1948 to 1950 he worked as a research chemist at the Institute for the Study of Metals at the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1949 with an M.Sc.
[1][3][4] At the University of Chicago, he was inspired by Alexander Koyré[2] and Farrington Daniels to study the history of science.
[1] During his years of study for his Ph.D., Hiebert was appointed to assistant professor of chemistry at San Francisco State College, a position he held 1952–1954.
[1] From 1954 to 1955 he resided in Germany to serve as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Max Planck Institute for Physics, then in Göttingen.
[1][3][4] Hiebert's doctoral students that he supervised or co-supervised include Jed Buchwald, Michael J. Crowe, Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Diana L. Kormos-Buchwald, Carolyn Merchant, Mary Jo Nye, Joan L. Richards, and Roger H.
[2][4] For many years during his retirement, he continued to commute almost every day from Belmont to Harvard to work at Widener Library.
[1] From 1970 to 1980 Hiebert was a member of the advisory committee of the multi-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography, published by Charles Scribner's Sons.
[2] Hiebert, Robert Sonné Cohen, and Everett Mendelsohn were the general editors of D. Reidel's book series Studies in the History of Science.
[2][4] His 1962 book Historical Roots of the Principle of Conservation of Energy is a notable achievement in writing the history of thermodynamics.
[2][17] He wrote papers about the science and philosophy of Max Planck, Ernst Mach, Walther Nernst, Ludwig Boltzmann, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Wilhelm Ostwald.