During this time, his research focus shifted to particle physics and he investigated the nature of relativistic field theories with spontaneously broken symmetries.
With Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg, he proved that in such theories zero-mass particles (Nambu–Goldstone bosons) must exist.
In the early 1970s, with Peter Goddard, Claudio Rebbi and Charles Thorn, he worked out the light-cone quantization theory of relativistic strings.
Goldstone published research on solitons in quantum field theory with Roman Jackiw and Frank Wilczek, and on the quantum strong law of large numbers with Edward Farhi and Samuel Gutmann.
Since 1997, he has been working, with Farhi, Gutmann, Michael Sipser and Andrew Childs, on quantum computation algorithms.