Moving to Pasadena, California, he worked with Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, both winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

[10] He then moved to Geneva, Switzerland and worked as a fellow at CERN (the European organisation for nuclear research) for two years.

Hey worked about thirty years as an academic at University of Southampton, starting in 1974 as a particle physicist.

There he learned of Carver Mead's work on very-large-scale integration and become interested in applying parallel computing techniques to large-scale scientific simulations.

He then worked with Jack Dongarra, Rolf Hempel and David Walker, to define the Message Passing Interface (MPI)[12] which became a de facto open standard for parallel scientific computing.

[citation needed] Hey has authored or co-authored a number of books including The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery,[21] The Quantum Universe[22],The New Quantum Universe,[23] The Feynman Lectures on Computation[24][25] and Einstein's Mirror.