He returns to the bookstore with a new updated edition “The Tao of Physics”. The essay of Fritjof Capra that for fifty years explores the surprising parallels between the discoveries of modern physics and the wisdom of oriental philosophies.
Imagine a theoretical physique that, in the midst of the 70s, declares that the answers to the ultimate questions about the subject are not only found in the great accelerators of particles, but also in ancient texts of oriental mysticism. It seems the beginning of a new age book, yet it is the true story of Fritjof Capra and its “The Tao of physics”, a essay that 50 years after the first publication returns to the bookstore (for abocation editions) with a renewed guise and a message, if possible, even more disruptive.
Fritjof Capra, born in Vienna in 1939, is not a philosopher lent to science. It is a physique with an impeccable curriculum. After a doctorate in theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, he dedicated years to research on the physics of the particles and on the theory of Quan in prestigious university and research centers, from Paris to Stanford. It was precisely from this privileged position that he began to see cracks in the classic mechanistic paradigm and note surprising assonances with the thought of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism.
The book was born from an electrocution had on a Californian beach in 1969: “I was sitting on the ocean on an late summer afternoon, I looked at the waves that advanced towards the shore and I felt the rhythm of my breath, when I suddenly had the awareness that the entire environment that surrounded me was engaged in a giant cosmic dance …”. A revelation that will open to years of investigations and insights, and that will lead Fritjof Capra to trace a punctual parallelism between the knowledge of modern physics and those of oriental mysticism. The author thus comes to argue that, while coming from very different cultural and methodological contexts, science and spirituality converge towards a unitary, dynamic and interconnected vision of reality.
This “dance” became its key metaphor. For physicists, it is the dance of subatomic particles, an incessant whirlwind of energy in which the particles are created and annihilated, emerging from the void and disappearing. For Eastern mystics, it is the dance of the god Shiva, a symbol of a never static universe, a perennial flow of creation and destruction that constitutes the very essence of reality. Two different languages to describe the same thing: a reality not made of separate “objects” but of relationships, dynamic and interconnected patterns.
But is it just a suggestive metaphor or is there more? 50 years later, in a new preface and two unpublished essays, it is Capra himself to answer.
In the afterword dedicated to La Nuova Physics, Capra reflects on how the theories and scientific advancements of the last decades -from the quantum entanglement to discover the Bosone of Higgs -concur to strengthen the intuitions at the base of his text. In the Posccitto that closes the book, entitled Science, Spirituality and Religion, starting from a historical reconstruction and its experience, the author describes the relationship between scientific research and spiritual research.
Reading “the Tao of physics” today is not an exercise in cultural archeology. It is an intellectual challenge that invites us to question our mental categories.
With this publication, Aboca Edizioni celebrates not only an anniversary and an important editorial milestone, but he brings together all the works of one of the most original and incisive thinkers of the last decades. The Tao of physics thus fits into the catalog of the publishing house next to the other books of Fritjof Capra – from life and nature to the systemic principles of life – going to further enrich a cultural offer marked by the study of nature and the interconnection between all living systems.
