Edward Walter Bastin, always known as Ted Bastin, who has died in Wales at 85, was a highly original quantum physicist who never had a conventional academic career and who also had life-long interests in the paranormal and religion. His early work, as a Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge, was the creation of a theory of quantum physics that was closely tied to the notion of computation, even though computational machinery at that time was utterly primitive by today’s standards. His “combinatorial cycles” programs ran for very long periods on EDSAC, which was the main Cambridge University computer in the early 1960s.
His principal insight was that some aspects of quantum phenomena could be seen in cybernetic terms, as forms of self-organization that could be captured by computation, in his case by complex calculations over hierarchies. Much of the mathematics underlying this came from his collaborations with Clive Kilmister, a Professor at the University of London, John Amson, a mathematician at the University of St. Andrews and Frederick Parker-Rhodes, an unconventional polymath who, like Bastin, was based at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, a small museum in its suburbs throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It was there that Bastin encountered Stuart Linney, a South African philosopher who knew of Brouwer’s non-standard logic, which later became a key ingredient in Bastin’s theories.
Bastin published a series of papers on these computations and drew together a range of distinguished scientists who also held views at odds with the conventional quantum theory of the time. The volume Quantum Theory and Beyond edited by Bastin and published in 1971 (reprinted 2009) had contributions by Roger Penrose, David Bohm and others, and came from a seminal meeting at the Royal Society in 1968 chaired by O.R.Frisch. Bastin later wrote, again with Kilmister, Combinatorial Physics in 1995 and their last book in 2009 was The Origin of Discrete Particles. The movement he helped found is now known as “bit-string physics” and was the underlying theory behind ANPA—the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association—which he started with Pierre Noyes of Stanford University and others in 1979, and which continues to hold annual meetings in Cambridge. ANPA has sought original links between the very small (quantum theory), the very large (cosmology, the universe as a whole) and the so-called “dimensionless constants” in the spirit of Sir Arthur Eddington, who first drew all these notions together in the 1920s.
The link between quantum physics and information theory, in a broad sense, has grown stronger in recent years, as computer scientists investigate the possibility of quantum physics providing a new basis for computer hardware and, simultaneously, quantum physicists investigate the information basis of their subject. But there is little recognition in recent research of the origin of the latter idea in the pioneering work of Bastin and others long ago.
Edward Walter Bastin was born in Tottenham, North London, on January 8th. 1926, the son of Arthur Bastin and Emma Lucy Dunk. He was educated at the Sir George Monoux Grammar School, Walthamstow and in 1944 went to Queen Mary College, now Queen Mary University, within the University of London to study physics. He later gained doctoral degrees in both physics and mathematics from Kings College, Cambridge to which he won an Isaac Newton studentship and where he was a Research Fellow for three years. He was also a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University. He married parapsychologist Suzanne Padfield, whom he met on a television programme about the paranormal in 1975. They lived in West Wickham, Cambridge for many years, where the barn he had restored burned down and many of his papers were lost in the fire, retiring to Ceredigion, West Wales, in 1996.
Bastin had a serious interest in paranormal phenomena and believed that they, too, challenged the basis of conventional physics. He took an early interest in the demonstrations of Uri Geller, at a time when his performances had not been attacked as a form of conjuring. At a meeting Bastin organized in London in 1972 Uri Geller attempted to bend spoons and restart stopped watches before a small audience including Kwame Anthony Appiah, Arthur Koestler, Tim Eiloart and Arthur C. Clarke. Bastin wrote a long account of the session describing his mixed feelings about what he had witnessed.
Bastin was also, with Margaret Masterman and the distinguished philosophers Richard Braithwaite, her husband, and Dorothy Emmet, a founding member of the Epiphany Philosophers in Cambridge, a society consisting mostly of Quakers and high Anglicans, founded to pursue links between science and religion, and which was based on the journal Theoria to Theory. Masterman was also the Director of the Cambridge Language Research Unit, across Millington Road from the Braithwaite family home, where Bastin lived in a caravan in the garden for many years before his marriage. The interaction of the research unit and the Epiphany Philosophers—which had overlapping but separate memberships—was a time of extraordinary intellectual ferment, based on these two sites in Millington Road in the 1960s, not only in fundamental physics, but in artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of religion. It was also the original home of Rupert Sheldrake’s work on morphic resonance. Bastin was a core member of both groups and superintended the quarterly move of the Epiphany Philosophers to their meeting at a remote mill on the coast of Norfolk using his robust fleet of vehicles which included a large and powerful Austin Healy and Alcuin, a vast surplus Humber desert staff car from WWII. Alcuin was shipped to New York for a cosmology meeting in the 1960’s, packed with electrical gear, but the engine failed at the junction of 7th Avenue and Broadway with Bastin at the wheel. A colleague recalls a trip to see the editor of Nature in London in the Healey during which it had to be controlled in part with a pair of pliers. Bastin revelled in the practicalities of things more than most academics: if he went to a formal dinner in Kings, his cuff-links were normally a shiny pair of nuts and bolts.
Bastin was not only an intellectual, of whom Kilmister said he knew things no one had any right to know, but a striking physical presence, one whose primary expression was puzzlement, especially at very complex and incomprehensible things but also at many everyday details. He was a serious cricketer and table tennis player, and in his youth a formidable oarsman. Among the boats stored at the King’s College boathouse on the Cam is “Ted”, a lightweight wooden scull in which Bastin won races for King’s from 1950 to 1953.
Edward Walter Bastin, theoretical physicist, born Tottenham 8 January 1926, m. Suzanne Padfield 1976, one son b. 1977, died Wales, 15 October 2011.
Yorick Wilks
