Basil Hiley
His interest in science was stimulated by his teachers at secondary school and by books, in particular The Mysterious Universe by James Hopwood Jeans and Mr Tompkins in Wonderland by George Gamow.[3] Hiley wanted to investigate how physics could be based on a notion of process, and he found that David Bohm held similar ideas.[9] He reports that during the seminars he held together with Roger Penrose he was particularly fascinated by John Wheeler's "sum over three geometries" ideas that he was using to quantise gravity.Hiley worked with David Bohm for many years on fundamental problems of theoretical physics.[12] He was awarded the 2012 Majorana Prize in the category The Best Person in Physics for the algebraic approach to quantum mechanics and furthermore in recognition of "his paramount importance as natural philosopher, his critical and open minded attitude towards the role of science in contemporary culture".[24] They called attention to the importance of the early work of Louis de Broglie on pilot waves, emphasizing his insight and physical intuition and stating that developments based on his ideas aimed at a better understanding than mathematical formalism alone.[34] Summarizing Bohm's and his own interpretation, Hiley has explained that the quantum potential "does not give rise to a mechanical force in the Newtonian sense.[38] It is independent of field intensity, thus fulfilling a precondition for non-locality, and it carries information about the whole experimental arrangement in which the particle finds itself.[41][42][43][44] Bohm and Hiley proposed a new interpretation of the Lorentz transformation[45] and considered the relativistic invariance of a quantum theory based on the notion of beables, a term coined by John Bell[46] to distinguish these variables from observables.The textbook spin-0, spin-1 and spin-2 bosons, such as the Higgs, photons, gluons, electroweak bosons and gravitons [...] are, according to this viewpoint, not "particles" in any naive sense of the word, but just dynamical structural features of coupled continuous scalar, vector, and symmetric tensor fields that first become manifest when interactions with matter particles (elementary or otherwise) occur [...].Much of Bohm and Hiley's work in the 1970s and 1980s has expanded on the notion of implicate, explicate and generative orders proposed by Bohm.In 2013 the research group at Birkbeck summarized their over-all approach as follows:[54] As of 1980, Hiley and his co-worker Fabio A. M. Frescura expanded on the notion of an implicate order by building on the work of Fritz Sauter and Marcel Riesz who had identified spinors with minimal left ideals of an algebra.[60] With their approach based on algebraic idempotents, Bohm and Hiley "incorporate Bohr's notion of 'wholeness' and d'Espagnat's concept of 'non-separability' in a very basic way".They noted that this work stands in close connection with Ilya Prigogine's proposal of a Liouville space extension of quantum mechanics.Along similar lines, both Gerard 't Hooft and John Archibald Wheeler, questioning whether space-time was the appropriate starting-point for describing physics, had called for a deeper structure as starting point.In the view of Bohm and Hiley, "things, such as particles, objects, and indeed subjects, are considered as semi-autonomous quasi-local features of this underlying activity".In this picture, the classical limit for quantum phenomena, in terms of a condition that the action function is not much greater than the Planck constant, indicates one such criterion.[69] This concept, which avowedly has similarities with the notion of organic mechanism of Alfred North Whitehead,[69][70] underlies Bohm and Hiley's efforts to establish algebraic structures that relate to quantum physics and to find an ordering that describes thought processes and the mind.In 1985, Bohm and Hiley showed that Wheeler's delayed choice experiment does not require the existence of the past to be limited to its recording in the present.[92] Around the same time, in 1997, Hiley's co-worker Melvin Brown[94] showed that the Bohm interpretation of quantum physics need not rely on a formulation in terms of ordinary space (In 2000, Brown and Hiley showed that the Schrödinger equation can be written in a purely algebraic form that is independent of any representation in a Hilbert space.[81] Hiley demonstrated the equivalence between Moyal's characteristic function for the Wigner quasi-probability distribution F(x,p,t) and von Neumann's idempotent within the proof of the Stone–von Neumann theorem, concluding: "In consequence, F(x,p,t) is not a probability density function but a specific representation of the quantum mechanical density operator", thus the Wigner–Moyal formalism exactly reproduces the results of quantum mechanics.[110] In Hiley's framework, the quantum potential arises as "a direct consequence of projecting the non-commutative algebraic structure onto a shadow manifold" and as a necessary feature which ensures that both energy and momentum are conserved.[101] With these results, Hiley gave evidence to the notion that the ontology of implicate and explicate orders could be understood as a process described in terms of an underlying non-commutative algebra, from which spacetime could be abstracted as one possible representation.Hiley expanded on the notion of a process algebra as proposed by Hermann Grassmann and the ideas of distinction[81] of Louis H. Kauffman."[116] Hiley has worked with Maurice A. de Gosson on the relation between classical and quantum physics, presenting a mathematical derivation of the Schrödinger equation from Hamiltonian mechanics.[85] He has referred to this as "a remarkable discovery, so obvious that I am surprised we didn't spot it sooner", pointing out that on this basis the quantum potential constitutes the missing energy term that is required for local energy–momentum conservation.[135] In Hiley's view the Bohm model and Bell's inequalities allowed a debate on the notion of non-locality in quantum physics or, in Niels Bohr's words, wholeness to surface.[139] He points out that the algebraic representation allows to establish a connection to the thermo field dynamics of Hiroomi Umezawa,[55][81] using a bialgebra constructed from a two-time quantum theory.[97] Hiley is cited, together with Whitehead, Bohr and Bohm, for the "stance of elevating processes to a privileged role in theories of physics".[144] Hiley and Pylkkänen addressed the question of the relation between mind and matter by the hypothesis of an active information contributing to quantum potential.[69] In this context, Hiley spoke of his aim of finding "an algebraic description of those aspects of this implicate order where mind and matter have their origins".
Britishquantumphysicistprofessor emeritusUniversity of LondonBritish BurmaKing's College LondonMajorana PrizePhysicsQuantum mechanicsDavid Bohmimplicate ordersClifford algebrasstochasticimplicate orderBritish RajHampshireThe Mysterious UniverseJames Hopwood JeansMr Tompkins in WonderlandGeorge Gamowrandom walkmacromoleculeIsing modellattice constantgraph theoreticalcondensed matter physicsferromagnetspolymerCyril DombMichael FisherCumberland LodgeRoger PenroseJohn Wheelertheoretical physicsEinstein-Schrödinger equationBohm's interpretationquantum theoryBirkbeck Collegefield equationsBell's theoremmany-body systemnon-localityquantum potentialrelativitytwo-slit experimentcomputer simulationsdouble-slit experimentAharonov–Bohm effectLouis de Brogliepilot wavesquantum tunnelingmeasurement problemcollapse of the wave functionquantum field theoriesCopenhagen interpretationself-organisingPaul Diracqubitsquantum teleportationMinkowski spacetimeLorentz transformationJohn Bellobservablesimplicate, explicate and generative ordersWholeness and the Implicate OrderScience, Order, and CreativityF. David PeatFritz SauterMarcel Rieszspinorsminimal left idealsGrassmannHamiltonCliffordoperatorsstate vectorsidempotentsArthur Stanley Eddingtonidempotentprocess philosophyd'Espagnatdensity matrixLiouville equationphase spaceWigner–Moyal approachnegative probabilitiesIlya PrigogineMario SchönbergDirac algebraPeter R. HollandfermionsbosonsBohm's notion of implicate and explicit ordersrepresentationstwistor theoryClifford algebraPauli Clifford algebraconformal Clifford algebraQuantum CloudAntony GormleyGerard 't HooftJohn Archibald Wheelerpregeometryfoam-like structureStephen Hawkingalgebraspacetimespacetime manifoldlocalityclassical limitaction functionPlanck constantholomovementAlfred North WhiteheadWheeler's delayed choice experimentstatistical mechanicsthought experimentsEinsteinPodolskyEPR paradoxLucien HardyHardy's paradoxspecial relativitymomentum spacecommutator