Basil Hiley

Basil Hiley (born November 15, 1935 in Burma ) is a British theoretical physicist. He was a professor at the University of London .

Hiley was the son of a British military man and came to England when he was twelve to attend school. He studied at King's College London , where he received his doctorate in theoretical solid-state physics with Cyril Domb and Michael E. Fisher in 1962 . In 1961 he became an assistant lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, where David Bohm had recently been a professor. Decades of collaboration began with Bohm and his alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics, which culminated in the 1993 book The Undivided Universe . In 1995 he received a chair at Birkbeck College.

In the search for an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics with Bohm, Hiley pursued in particular the construction on algebraic theories (Clifford algebras), as a kind of pre-geometry in the sense of John Archibald Wheeler (who for the quantization of gravity as early as the 1950s the necessity of a Moving away from the description in the space-time framework), from which a space-time description will later result. In doing so, he and Bohm include considerations of natural philosophy and, in their own words, tie in a process-based pre-geometry to the philosophical ideas of Alfred North Whitehead . Bohm and Hiley interpret the quantum potential in Bohm's interpretation , which is the source of non-locality, as active information and see this as the basis for a joint treatment of matter and spirit.

In 2012 he received the Majorana Prize .

Fonts

• with David Bohm: The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory , Routledge 1993
• Editor with David Peat: Quantum implications. Essays in Honor of David Bohm , Routledge 1987
• with David Bohm: An ontological basis of quantum theory I , Physics Reports 144, 1987, pp. 323-348

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