Appreciating a Hiley Respected Colleague

One cannot sensibly introduce Basil Hiley’s work as a mathematical physicist without his collaboration with David Bohm, lasting from 1962, when Basil went to Birkbeck College, to Bohm’s death in 1992. The beginning of their careers shows an astonishing similarity in the study of collective phenomena—Bohm in plasmas, Basil in molecules. However, their topics changed drastically over time, and their style of work was different: While Bohm tended to subordinate formal details under conceptual issues, Basil would keep being worried if the math had not been done even if it seemed clear how a problem should be understood. This fruitful complementarity of inclinations was one of the driving forces behind their more than twenty joint papers between 1970 and 1989 and their book “The Undivided Universe”, first published in 1993. The main themes of Basil’s work can be seen under two topics devised by Bohm: the quantum potential and the implicate order. The first of them arose from Bohm’s 1952 paper (the “B52”, as they used to call it at Birkbeck) on a novel way to look at the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics. This new look was achieved by a simple mathematical reformulation leading to a classical Hamilton-Jacobi equation plus an additional term called the quantum potential. Although this paper explicitly focused on hidden variables beneath the level of Hilbert space quantum theory, both Bohm and Basil soon realized that classical hidden variables fall short of the actual lesson of the quantum potential: the nonlocality, or holism, of quantum theory. Sys-