Ted Bastin (b. Edward William Bastin, 8 January 1926, died Wales 15 October 2011) was a physicist and mathematician who held doctorate degrees in both physics and mathematics from Kings College, Cambridge University, to which he won an Isaac Newton studentship. For a time, he was Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, California and a Research Fellow, King's College, Cambridge University, England. He also studied at Queen Mary College, London.
Among the boats stored at the Cam River boathouse, King's College, Cambridge University include "Ted" the lightweight wooden scull named after Ted Bastin, who won races in it for King's[1] from 1950 to 1953.
Bastin’s research specialties included the foundations of physics, especially the discrete and finite aspects of quantum mechanics and relativity. He was strongly influenced as a student by Eddington's vision of the nature of the quantum.
He collaborated with David Bohm to organize the "Quantum Theory and Beyond" colloquium at Cambridge University in July 1968, chaired by O. R. Frisch. The colloquium was sponsored by the Royal Society, The Carnegie Institution of Science, and Theoria Inc., and resulted in a book by the same name. Bastin worked with David Bohm on other theoretical physics projects as well.
Along with Frederick Parker-Rhodes and Clive W. Kilmister, Ted Bastin is noted for the discovery of, and research on applications of, the combinatorial hierarchy. The combinatorial hierarchy plays an important role in bit-string physics, to which Bastin has also contributed. While at the Cambridge Language Research Unit (founded by Margaret Masterman) he and Parker-Rhodes used Maurice Wilkes' EDSAC to compute the combinatorial hierarchy.
Bastin was a founding member, with H. Pierre Noyes and C. W. Kilmister, of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association (ANPA), Cambridge, England. Their "first meeting was held in the fall of 1979 at Prof. Kilmister's "Red Tiles Cottage " near Lewes, and near Thomas Paine's birthplace".[2] The organization was joined in 1980 by A. F. Parker-Rhodes, David McGoveran, and John Amson, among others. Meetings were held annually at King's College, Cambridge University.
Bastin was also, with Margaret Masterman, Dorothy Emmet and R. B. Braithwaite a founding member of the Epiphany Philosophers in Cambridge, a society founded to pursue links between science and religion, and which was based on the journal Theoria to Theory.