Career
Foreign a time, he was Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, California and a Research Fellow, King"s College, Cambridge University, England. 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 Incorporated., 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 West. 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 West. 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 Professor Kilmister"s "Red Tiles Cottage " near Lewes, and near Thomas Paine"s birthplace".
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.
Bastin died in Wales in 2011.