Fritjof Capra

Fritjof Capra (born February 1, 1939) is an Austrian-born American author, physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist. In 1995, he became a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He was on the faculty of Schumacher College, which was disestablished in 2024.

Capra is the author of several books, including The Tao of Physics (1975), The Turning Point (1982), Uncommon Wisdom (1988), The Web of Life (1996), and The Hidden Connections (2002), and co-author of The Systems View of Life (2014).

Life and work Born in Vienna, Austria, Capra attended the University of Vienna, where he earned his PhD in theoretical physics in 1966. He conducted research in particle physics and systems theory at the University of Paris (1966–1968), the University of California, Santa Cruz (1968–1970), the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (1970), Imperial College, London (1971–1974) and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (1975–1988). While at Berkeley, he was a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, founded in May 1975 by Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, which met weekly to discuss philosophy and quantum physics. He also taught at U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Berkeley, and San Francisco State University.

He has written popular books on the implications of science, notably The Tao of Physics (1975) , subtitled An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. The Tao of Physics asserts that both physics and metaphysics lead inexorably to the same knowledge. After touring Germany in the early 1980s, Capra co-wrote Green Politics with author Charlene Spretnak in 1984.

Capra contributed to the screenplay for the 1990 movie Mindwalk, starring Liv Ullmann, Sam Waterston and John Heard. The film is loosely based on his book, The Turning Point.

In 1991 Capra co-authored Belonging to the Universe with David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk. Using Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a stepping stone, the book explores parallels between new paradigm thinking in science and in religion; the authors posit that, together, these new paradigms offer remarkably compatible views about the universe.

He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy located in Berkeley, California, which promotes ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education.

Capra is an Earth Charter International Council member.

Intellectual influence of Geoffrey Chew and Bootstrap Theory Although Capra received his PhD under Walter Thirring, he identifies physicist Geoffrey Chew as his primary scientific mentor. During his fourteen years associated with Chew’s research group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1975–1988), Capra became a proponent of the S-matrix bootstrap theory.

The bootstrap model, which posits that the universe is a self-consistent "web" of interrelated events rather than a collection of fundamental building blocks, served as the scientific foundation for Capra's philosophy. Capra has stated that his discussions with Chew served as his "training in systemic thinking," allowing him to transition from particle physics to broader systems theory.

Year later, in a memoriam about Geoffrey Chew published on his own blog, Capra acknowledged that bootstrap theory was eclipsed by the success of the Standard Model and largely disappeared from mainstream physics. However, he also said that since "the standard model does not include gravity, and hence fails to integrate all known particles and forces into a single mathematical framework [...], the bootstrap idea may well be revived someday, in some mathematical formulation or other."