The Tao Of Physics

A fascinating exploration of the innumerable parallels between cutting edge physics and Eastern philosophies. The book tends to become too technical and somewhat boring for the non-scientist reader at times, but the explanations following such technical content is beautiful. The book introduces you to many concepts in the Tao, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. The overarching summary of the book is ‘entanglement' or ‘interconnectedness'. Every single iota of creation is energy, not a discrete object by itself. You are affected by others actions, and you affect the actions of others. So, choose your thoughts and the people around you wisely, they will influence your future.

I expected this book to be a non-sensical mixture of pseudoscience and mysticism, that relies on half-understood concepts of quantum mechanics to prove its point.
However, Capra separately describes important discoveries and key experiments in modern physics in an intuitive way and seems not to leave out important points.
The description of the concepts of Eastern mysticism, however, fall short and are largely superficial and general.
The synthesis of both is also quite vague and only relies on seemingly similar view points or expressions that happen to be the same in both physics and mysticism. The descriptions of both sides, and of the connection between both could be considerably longer and more detailled.
4 stars because the physics part covers most important and interesting topics of modern physics (special relativity, general relativity, wave-particle duality, atomic model, elementary particles, ...) and explains them for the layperson in such a way, that the gist (and why this was a revolution) can be understood, without losing much of the scientific rigor of the formulation.

A nuclear physicist's ruminations on eastern philosophy and the parallels between physics and metaphysics. This book will be special to me always because it led me to discovering Heisenberg, quantum mechanics, Zen and Taoism. The sense I got out of this book was physics - science, even - is so much bigger, better and grander than what school textbooks could ever, ever tell you. Beautiful. Opened my eyes.