Fritjof Capra (nacido el 1 de Febrero de 1939) es un reconocido Físico Austriaco nacido en Viena. Doctor en física teórica por la Universidad de Viena (1966), Fritjof Capra ha trabajado como investigador en física subatómica en la Universidad de París, en la Universidad de California (U.C.) en Santa Cruz, en el Acelerador Lineal de Londres y en el Laboratorio Lawrence Berkeley de la U.C. También ha sido profesor en la U.C. en Santa Cruz, en Berkeley y en la Universidad de San Francisco.
En paralelo a sus actividades de investigación y enseñanza, desde hace más de 30 años Capra ha estudiado en profundidad las consecuencias filosóficas y sociales de la ciencia moderna. Sobre este tema imparte seminarios y conferencias, con relativa frecuencia, en diversos países.
Su producción literaria se inició con la publicación de un icono moderno: "El Tao de la Física", best-seller que supuso el punto de partida de numerosas publicaciones sobre la interrelación entre el universo descubierto por la física moderna y el misticismo antiguo, principalmente oriental.
Sus trabajos de investigación y divulgación siguientes incluyen estudios en que los postulados aportados por su primer libro se extienden a otras áreas, como la biología y la ecología, enfatizando en todos ellos la necesidad de alcanzar una nueva comprensión del universo que nos rodea como un todo en el que, para comprender sus partes, es necesario estudiar su interrelación con el resto de los fenómenos, pues su visión está basada en que la naturaleza de la realidad es un proceso creativo e interconectado en el que nada puede ser entendido por sí mismo, sino por su pertenencia a la infinita y extensa danza de la creación.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra
The Tao of Physics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Physics
"I had several discussions with Heisenberg. I lived in England then [circa 1972], and I visited him several times in Munich and showed him the whole manuscript chapter by chapter. He was very interested and very open, and he told me something that I think is not known publicly because he never published it. He said that he was well aware of these parallels. While he was working on quantum theory he went to India to lecture and was a guest of Tagore. He talked a lot with Tagore about Indian philosophy. Heisenberg told me that these talks had helped him a lot with his work in physics, because they showed him that all these new ideas in quantum physics were in fact not all that crazy. He realized there was, in fact, a whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas. Heisenberg said that this was a great help for him. Niels Bohr had a similar experience when he went to China. – Fritjof Capra, interviewed by Renee Weber in the book The Holographic Paradigm (page 217–218)"2007, The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance.
Leonardo da Vinci, the great master painter and genius of the Renaissance, has been the subject of hundreds of scholarly and popular books. However, there are surprisingly few books about Leonardo’s science, although he left voluminous notebooks full of detailed descriptions of his experiments, magnificent drawings, and long analyses of his findings.
Moreover, most authors who have discussed Leonardo’s scientific work examined it through a Newtonian lens. This has often prevented them from understanding its essential nature, which is that of a science of organic forms, a science of qualities, one that is radically different from the mechanistic science of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton.
The Science of Leonardo presents a radically new interpretation of Leonardo’s science, evaluated from the perspective of 21st century scientific thought. Studying Leonardo from this perspective not only allows us to recognize his science as a solid body of knowledge, but also shows why it cannot be understood without his art, nor his art without the science*
En la dimensión cuántica (tao of physics)
En la dimensión áurea (vitruvio man, leonardo da vinci)
*
The systems view of life
Conexiones ocultas. Redes RTVE
Shiva Dance at CERN
On June 18, 2004, an unusual new landmark was unveiled at CERN, the European Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva — a 2m tall statue of the Indian deity Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of Dance. The statue, symbolizing Shiva's cosmic dance of creation and destruction, was given to CERN by the Indian government to celebrate the research center's long association with India.
In choosing the image of Shiva Nataraja, the Indian government acknowledged the profound significance of the metaphor of Shiva's dance for the cosmic dance of subatomic particles, which is observed and analyzed by CERN's physicists. The parallel between Shiva's dance and the dance of subatomic particles was first discussed by Fritjof Capra in an article titled "The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics," published in Main Currents in Modern Thought in 1972. Shiva's cosmic dance then became a central metaphor in Capra's international bestseller The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975 and still in print in over 40 editions around the world.
A special plaque next to the Shiva statue at CERN explains the significance of the metaphor of Shiva's cosmic dance with several quotations from The Tao of Physics. Here is the text of the plaque:
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, seeing beyond the unsurpassed rhythm, beauty, power and grace of the Nataraja, once wrote of it "It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of."
More recently, Fritjof Capra explained that "Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter," and that "For the modern physicists, then, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter."
It is indeed as Capra concluded: "Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics."
