Högskolan i Skövde

This is an obituary for the British physicist Basil J. Hiley (1935-2025). Most people knew him as someone who worked for 30 years with the physicist David Bohm, who was a student of Robert Oppenheimer and an associate of Albert Einstein. Together they developed a new holistic framework for physics which includes both a general implicate order approach, and a more specific ontological interpretation of quantum theory (variously known as the Bohm theory, ‘hidden variables’ interpretation, pilot-wave theory, de Broglie-Bohm interpretation, and the causal interpretation). After Bohm died in 1992, Hiley developed the research programme for more than 30 years.

The key concept for Hiley was movement and process. For Bohm and Hiley movement was something fundamental, a dynamic 'implicate order', from which material particles and fields, along with space and time, emerge into an 'explicate order'. Mathematically they adopted an algebraic approach, suggesting that the primary meaning of an algebraic symbol is that it describes a certain kind of movement.

Hiley was also interested in philosophical issues such as the relation of mind and matter.  In this area he collaborated with the author (Paavo Pylkkänen), and even taught a course on philosophy of quantum theory at the University of Skövde in the early 2000s.