Ted Bastin

Edward William "Ted" Bastin (8 January 1926 – 15 October 2011) was a physicist and mathematician who held doctorate degrees in mathematics from Queen Mary College, London University and physics from King's College, Cambridge, 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.

Among the boats stored at the River Cam 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, 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, Clive W. Kilmister and John Amson, 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 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, Clive W. Kilmister, John Amson and Frederick Parker-Rhodes, of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association (ANPA), Cambridge, England. Their "first meeting was held in the autumn 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 David McGoveran and Tom Etter, among others. Meetings were first held annually at King's College, Cambridge University and now continue annually at Westcott House.

Bastin gave serious attention to paranormal phenomena, notably the psychokinesis of Uri Geller.^[3][4][5]

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.

Bastin died in Wales in 2011.

Publications

• A Sequential Logic for Information Structuring in "Mathematics of a Hierarchy of Brouwerian Operations" with A. F. Parker-Rhodes (Fort Belvoir Defense Technical Information Center 01 MAY 1965).

• Quantum Theory and Beyond. Ted Bastin ed. Cambridge University Press, 1971 (papers from the Quantum Theory and Beyond colloquium). ISBN 0-521-07956-X

• The Origin of Discrete Particles (Series on Knots and Everything, vol. 42) by T. Bastin and C. W. Kilmister (7 Aug 2009) "The Origin of Discrete Particles (Series on Knots and Everything, vol. 42)". World Scientific Publishing. Retrieved 27 July 2011. 

• Combinatorial Physics (Series on Knots and Everything, vol. 9) by Ted Bastin and C. W. Kilmister (Oct 1995) "Combinatorial Physics (Series on Knots and Everything, vol. 9)". World Scientific Publishing Co., Inc. Retrieved 27 July 2011.  ISBN 981-02-2212-2

• "A Clash of Paradigms in Physics", in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance (Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith eds.) 1978 "The Encyclopedia of Ignorance". Pocket Books. Retrieved 27 July 2011.  ISBN 0-671-79087-0

References