The Turning Point: Fritjof Capra's 1982 Book and the Film Mindwalk

The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture is a nonfiction book by the Austrian-born American physicist Fritjof Capra, published in 1982. It was his second popular book, following The Tao of Physics (1975), and it attempted something far broader than its predecessor. Where The Tao of Physics compared modern physics with Eastern mysticism, The Turning Point used systems theory to diagnose what Capra saw as a set of connected crises across medicine, psychology, economics, ecology and politics. His central claim was that these crises share one root: Western society, he argued, was still thinking with a mechanistic worldview inherited from René Descartes and Isaac Newton, even though modern physics had shown that worldview to be incomplete. The remedy, in his account, was a shift to holistic, ecological "systems thinking."

The book became one of the best-known texts of the late 20th-century holistic and ecological movements. It also attracted sharp criticism from scientists, including the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who called it "a noble failure." In 1990 it was loosely adapted into the film Mindwalk, directed by Capra's brother Bernt Capra and starring Liv Ullmann, Sam Waterston and John Heard, in which three characters debate the book's ideas while walking around Mont Saint-Michel in France.

This article explains the book's background, its structure and main arguments, its key concepts, how critics responded, the film it inspired, and how its ideas fit into Capra's later work. It aims to describe the book fairly, including where its claims have been contested.

Publication details

There is some inconsistency between catalogue sources about which publisher issued the first edition. Kirkus Reviews and The New York Review of Books both list Simon and Schuster for the 1982 hardcover, while the Wikipedia infobox gives Bantam Books, which issued the widely circulated 1983 paperback. The book was written for general readers and assumes no specialist scientific background.

The author: Fritjof Capra

Physicist turned popular writer

Fritjof Capra was born in Vienna, Austria, on 1 February 1939. He earned a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Vienna in 1966, with Walter Thirring as his doctoral adviser. He then worked in particle physics at a series of institutions, including the University of Paris, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Imperial College London and, from 1975 to 1988, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

The Tao of Physics

Capra became famous with The Tao of Physics (1975), subtitled An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. It argued that the picture of reality emerging from quantum physics and relativity, in which the world appears as a web of interconnected events rather than a collection of separate objects, resembles ideas found in Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. The book was a popular success and made Capra a prominent figure in what was often called the "new paradigm" or holistic movement.

The Turning Point builds directly on this. Capra took the claim that modern physics had overturned the mechanistic worldview and asked what would follow if that change were applied to every other field. A reviewer for The Tribune of India, Kuldip Singh Dhir, describes the later book as extending the links between science and mysticism that Capra had drawn in The Tao of Physics.

Later career

After The Turning Point, Capra's work moved further into ecology and education. He became a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, in 1995, an organisation that promotes ecology and systems thinking in schools. He developed the systems view of life in The Web of Life (1996), which draws on the work of Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Ilya Prigogine and Gregory Bateson, extended it to social questions in The Hidden Connections (2002), and summarised it in a textbook, The Systems View of Life (2014), co-written with the biochemist Pier Luigi Luisi. He also taught at Schumacher College in England.

The title and its source

The book's title draws on the ancient Chinese classic the I Ching, or Book of Changes. One of its hexagrams is usually translated as "Return" and in some translations as "The Turning Point." A widely circulated English rendering of its text begins: "After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns." Kirkus Reviews noted that Capra uses this image to argue that a turning point is arriving, with the return of suppressed "light" that arises spontaneously rather than by force.

The I Ching also supplied Capra with one of his recurring frameworks, the complementary principles of yin and yang. In the I Ching, each of the sixty-four hexagrams is made of six lines that are either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang). Capra used the yin and yang pair throughout the book as a way of describing balance and imbalance in a culture. According to Kirkus, he presented feminism as a source of renewal, framing it as a positive yin force against an aggressive yang.

The choice of title signals the book's basic optimism. Capra was not only diagnosing a crisis; he was predicting that the crisis would turn into a transformation.

The core argument in brief

The book's argument can be summarised in five steps.

1. The crises are connected. Problems in health, the economy, the environment, psychology and politics are not separate. Reviewer Kuldip Singh Dhir summarises Capra's claim that they are "essentially a crisis of perception."
2. The cause is an outdated worldview. Since the 17th century, Western culture has relied on a mechanistic model associated with Descartes and Newton: the world as a machine made of separate parts, understood by breaking it down into those parts (reductionism).
3. Physics has already moved on. Twentieth-century physics, in Capra's account, has shown that the mechanistic model is only an approximation. At the subatomic level the world looks like an interconnected web of relationships, and the observer cannot be fully separated from what is observed.
4. Other fields have not caught up. Biology, medicine, psychology and economics still model themselves on Newtonian physics, and this produces their failures.
5. A new paradigm is emerging. A systems view, which sees organisms, societies and ecosystems as integrated wholes, is rising through movements such as ecology, feminism, holistic health and alternative energy. Old institutions will resist but eventually decline.

The rest of the book develops each of these steps at length.

Structure of the book

The book is organised in four parts.

Part I: Crisis and Transformation

The opening part sets out the scale of the problem as Capra saw it. It focuses on fields concerned with health in a broad, ecological sense, including biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, economics and political science. Capra presents the crisis as many-sided: intellectual, moral and spiritual as well as practical. The framing is important, because it lets him treat issues as different as rising medical costs, environmental damage and economic instability as symptoms of the same underlying error.

Part II: The Two Paradigms

The second part sets up the book's central contrast.

The Newtonian world-machine. Capra traces how the mechanistic worldview took shape and how Newtonian mechanics lost its status as the foundation of physics by the late 19th century, as electrodynamics and the theory of evolution pointed to a more complex universe. In this view, Descartes's separation of mind and matter, and his method of breaking problems into parts, combined with Newton's mechanics to produce the image of the universe as a vast clockwork.

The new physics. Capra then presents relativity and quantum theory through his own lens, emphasising the ideas he finds philosophically significant. The Wikipedia summary of the book notes that many physicists did not accept some of these interpretations. This is one of the most contested parts of the book, as discussed under Criticism below.

Part III: The Influence of Cartesian-Newtonian Thought

The third part, the longest, applies the critique to one field after another. Kirkus described these surveys of Western ideas in economics, medicine and psychology as readable, though it added that they reveal their own gaps and biases.

The mechanistic view of life. Capra examines the limits of reductionism in biology, the habit of explaining living things entirely in terms of their smallest parts, such as genes and molecules.

The biomedical model. He argues that modern medicine loses sight of the patient as a whole person by focusing on smaller and smaller parts of the body, and that real change in health care requires wider social and cultural change, not just new treatments.

Newtonian psychology. He suggests that new ideas about the mind could help psychiatry move beyond Freudian frameworks. Kirkus notes that the book treats both Marx and Freud as "mired in the prevailing scientific paradigms."

The impasse of economics. Capra calls for a humanistic economics that takes account of human values, goals and lifestyles within the global ecosystem, rather than treating the economy as a self-contained machine measured by output alone.

The dark side of growth. He proposes a deeply ecological framework that he argues is compatible both with many traditional cultures and with modern physics. Kirkus records the book's criticism of nuclear power, agribusiness and the Green Revolution in agriculture.

Part IV: The New Vision of Reality

The final part sets out the alternative.

The systems view of life. Capra compares neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory with the views of the Jesuit palaeontologist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and argues for harmony between science and mysticism. He describes living systems as self-organising wholes made of parts that are themselves wholes. Dhir's review notes the book's use of the writer Arthur Koestler's term "holon" for something that is both a whole in itself and a part of a larger whole. Kirkus mentions the book's use of the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth's living and non-living parts form a self-regulating system.

Wholeness and health. Capra discusses holistic approaches to health, including the Simonton approach to cancer therapy developed by Carl Simonton and Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, which combined conventional treatment with psychological techniques. Kirkus lists other remedies the book discusses, including herbal medicine, forms of bodywork ("from Reich to Rolf"), and Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious.

Journeys beyond space and time. Here Capra argues that experiential psychotherapies would benefit from the new paradigm and that the main remaining obstacle to them is cognitive rather than emotional or physical.

The passage to the solar age. The closing chapter predicts that declining institutions will resist change and eventually collapse, while the "rising culture" of ecological, feminist and holistic movements becomes dominant. Capra finds grounds for optimism in the idea that short-term political manipulation cannot halt large-scale evolutionary change. The "solar age" refers both to renewable energy, which Kirkus lists among the book's proposals, and more broadly to a culture in harmony with natural cycles.

Method and style

The Turning Point is a work of synthesis rather than original research. Capra gathers ideas from a very wide range of thinkers and movements and arranges them into a single narrative. Within the sources cited here alone, the book draws on Descartes and Newton as the architects of the old worldview; on relativity and quantum theory; on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's view of evolution; on Arthur Koestler's idea of the holon; on the Gaia hypothesis; on Freud, Marx and Jung; on the Simonton approach to cancer care; on bodywork traditions from Wilhelm Reich to Ida Rolf; and on the I Ching.

This breadth is the book's main strength and its main weakness. For admirers such as Somaditya Banerjee, it produced a useful synthesis across the sciences and humanities, written so that any reader could follow it. For critics such as Kirkus, the range of ideas was so wide, and some so unconventional, that the argument lost its edge. A reader who wants to evaluate a specific claim in the book, for example about cancer therapy or about economics, generally needs to go to specialist literature in that field, because the book itself moves quickly from one discipline to the next.

The prose is direct and non-technical, without equations, and Capra frequently signals his own perspective, presenting the "new physics," as the Wikipedia summary puts it, through a personal lens. Havender acknowledged that Capra partly admitted this bias in the text.

Key concepts explained

Paradigm and paradigm shift

The word "paradigm" in this sense was popularised by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), where it meant the shared assumptions and methods that guide a scientific community. Kuhn argued that science sometimes changes through revolutions, in which one paradigm replaces another. Capra stretched the idea from science to culture as a whole: a "paradigm" in The Turning Point is an entire worldview, and the coming "paradigm shift" is a change in how a whole civilisation thinks.

This extension is one reason the book was both influential and criticised. It gave readers a powerful vocabulary for describing cultural change, but it also made large claims that are hard to test. A reader review on LibraryThing makes the point that whether a change counts as a "paradigm shift" can only be judged in hindsight.

The Cartesian-Newtonian worldview

Capra's shorthand for the outlook he rejects combines several ideas:

• Mind-body dualism, associated with Descartes: mind and matter are separate kinds of thing.
• Mechanism: the universe, and living things, work like machines.
• Reductionism: a complex system can be fully understood by analysing its parts.
• Linear causality: effects follow from causes in a straightforward chain.
• Science as the only valid knowledge, and a belief in unlimited material progress, which Dhir's review identifies as part of the target.

Capra argues that this worldview was enormously productive but has reached its limits and now causes harm when applied to living systems and societies.

The systems view

The systems view treats the world as made of integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of their parts. A living organism, a family, a society or an ecosystem is a system of interacting subsystems, and its important features come from the relationships between those parts. A line that Dhir quotes from the book puts the contrast compactly: "Machine is constructed whereas organism grows."

In practical terms, this means looking for patterns, feedback loops and context rather than isolated causes. For example, a systems approach to illness considers the patient's psychology, relationships, environment and society, not only a malfunctioning organ.

Self-organisation and ecological limits

A central systems idea in the book is self-organisation: living systems maintain and renew themselves, adapt, and evolve, rather than being assembled from outside like machines. Capra links this to an ecological ethic. Dhir quotes a sentence that captures it: "An organism that thinks only in terms of its own survival will invariably destroy both its environment and itself."

Yin and yang balance

Capra uses the Chinese pair of yin and yang to describe imbalances in Western culture. In his account, the culture has overemphasised one side of the pair, and the rising culture restores the balance. Kirkus singles out how he applies this to feminism, which he frames as a positive yin force set against an "aggressive" yang. Using an ancient Chinese pair of principles to describe modern Western politics is a metaphor rather than an analysis, and readers have to judge how far it illuminates and how far it simplifies.

Mechanistic and systems views compared

The contrast at the heart of the book can be set out as a table. The left column summarises the outlook Capra criticises and the right column the one he advocates, as described in the book's chapter structure and in the reviews cited in this article.

Critics would add a caution to this table. Gould and Havender both argued that real science is not as crudely mechanistic as the left column suggests, and that reductionist methods remain indispensable. The table describes Capra's framing, not a neutral consensus.

An illustrative example: two ways of looking at one problem

The following hypothetical example is not taken from the book. It is offered only to show, in plain terms, what the difference in approach means in practice.

Imagine a town where hospital admissions for asthma among children are rising.

A narrowly mechanistic approach would focus on the individual child's airways: diagnose the condition, prescribe medication, and measure success by how well symptoms are controlled. This is effective for each child and should not be dismissed.

A systems approach of the kind Capra advocates would ask further questions. Is air quality worsening because of traffic or industry? Are housing conditions, such as damp and mould, contributing? Do families have the money and time to attend follow-up appointments? Are school policies, transport planning and local economic pressures linked to the pattern? The aim is to see the rise in admissions as a property of a whole system involving bodies, homes, roads, jobs and policy, and to look for interventions anywhere in that system.

The example also shows the force of the critics' objections. The systems questions are valuable, but answering them still requires careful, often reductionist, research: measuring pollutants, testing which factors actually matter, and running controlled studies. In practice the two approaches are complementary, which is close to the position Gould took when he shared Capra's goal but rejected his dismissal of analysis.

Historical context

The Turning Point appeared at the start of the 1980s, and its themes reflect the preceding two decades. Concerns about pollution, nuclear power, the costs of modern medicine, and the limits of economic growth were all widely debated. Movements for ecology, feminism, holistic health and alternative energy had grown since the 1960s, and many readers saw them as connected. Capra's book offered a single framework that tied them together and gave them a scientific justification drawn from physics.

The reviewer for Reason magazine, William R. Havender, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, saw the book precisely as a product of that era, calling it a "confused, ignorant, and unrepentant revenant from the '60s." Supporters, on the other hand, saw it as giving intellectual shape to movements that had previously lacked a common theory.

Reception and criticism

The book received a wide range of responses, from strong praise to severe criticism. Reviews are summarised below and then grouped by theme.

Praise

Positive reviewers valued the book's ambition and clarity. Somaditya Banerjee, writing in Physics Bulletin in 1984, praised the argument as clearly expressed and accessible and the research as a useful synthesis across scientific and humanistic fields. James Connolly, in the Bethlehem University Journal in 1985, acknowledged that readers might be sceptical of survival manifestos but argued that any author proposing a remedy for such threats deserves attention. Catherine Twomey Fosnot, writing in 1986, noted that the book said nothing about education, but thought that its physicist's view of technology could indeed make it a "turning point." Many general readers found in it a coherent account of why problems in very different areas seemed to share a pattern.

Stephen Jay Gould: "a noble failure"

The most widely cited critique came from Stephen Jay Gould in The New York Review of Books, in a review titled "Utopia (Limited)" in the issue of 3 March 1983. Gould was not hostile to Capra's aim. He shared the commitment to moving beyond simple reductionism, and his own work on evolution emphasised hierarchical levels of explanation. But he judged the book "a noble failure" and found its reasoning shallow in many places. His main objections were:

• Too much blame on Descartes. Capra, Gould argued, blamed "Cartesianism" for far too many problems and idealised pre-modern Europe.
• Superficial analogies. He found Capra's comparisons between Eastern traditions and modern physics superficial.
• A hidden reductionism. Gould pointed out that the claim that physics reveals the fundamental unity of nature, and that other fields should follow physics, is itself a reductionist move, since it makes physics the master science.
• Nature and emotion over reason. He criticised Capra's appeals to nature and feeling over argument.
• Naive politics. He thought Capra's view of how the paradigm shift would happen politically was naive.
• Holism does not mean harmony. Most fundamentally, Gould argued that a holistic, hierarchical view of nature does not imply harmony among its levels. The interests of genes, organisms, species and ecosystems often conflict.

That last point is a substantive scientific objection. It suggests that the systems view, properly understood, does not automatically support the cooperative, harmonious society Capra hoped for.

William Havender in Reason

Havender's review, titled "Moxibustion, Indeed!", was far harsher. He argued that Capra presented contested interpretations of physics, such as the idea that subatomic particles lack objective existence and his support for the S-matrix (or "bootstrap") approach to particle physics, as settled fact, though Capra partly acknowledged his bias. In biology, Havender argued that reductionist research remained highly productive, citing work on simple nervous systems and on the control of tissue growth. In medicine, he described Capra's holistic alternatives as an uncritical grab bag and noted that cancer research was advancing through reductionist methods.

Havender also identified what he saw as an inconsistency: Capra praised decentralisation and self-organising systems, yet proposed expanded state power and redistribution, and he accepted spontaneous order in evolution and ecology while rejecting it in the economy. Havender credited Capra with understanding the open-ended nature of self-organising systems, but said he failed to apply that understanding to markets.

Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus found the book predictable and preachy and said it left out the countervailing forces and complexities in the history of science. It concluded that the holism became too vague to argue for, and that the range of thinkers and ideas the book embraced was "too far-out to be persuasive."

Philip Zaleski

Philip Zaleski, reviewing for The Boston Phoenix in 1982, described the "new paradigm" as already stale and the language as full of buzzwords: "Capra fails to persuade, in part, because his vocabulary is so hip it sounds worn out."

The physics problem

The criticism of Capra's physics has continued beyond these reviews. In Not Even Wrong (2006), the mathematical physicist Peter Woit criticised Capra for keeping the bootstrap approach to particle physics in later editions of The Tao of Physics after the Standard Model had largely replaced it, saying Capra had "left intact the now out-of-date physics." This matters for The Turning Point too, because the book's whole argument depends on the claim that modern physics points towards a holistic worldview of a particular kind. If the physics Capra relied on was a minority or superseded view, the foundation of the analogy is weaker.

Themes in the criticism

Taken together, the criticisms fall into four groups:

1. Overreach: the book attributes too many problems to a single cause.
2. Contested science: its interpretation of physics, and its dismissal of reductionist biology and medicine, were not shared by many working scientists.
3. Vagueness: "holism" and "systems thinking" become so broad that they are hard to test or argue against.
4. Political naivety or inconsistency: the book's predictions about social change, and its mixture of decentralist and statist proposals, were questioned.

Supporters reply that the book was never meant as a technical treatise, that it identified real limitations of narrow specialisation, and that many of its themes, such as ecological thinking, systems approaches in health, and concern about the environmental costs of growth, later moved into the mainstream.

The film: Mindwalk (1990)

Production

Mindwalk is a 1990 American film directed by Bernt Capra, Fritjof's brother. The screenplay was written by Floyd Byars and Fritjof Capra, adapted from a short story by Bernt Capra based on The Turning Point. The score was composed by Philip Glass. The film runs 112 minutes and was shot on location at Mont Saint-Michel, the tidal island abbey in Normandy.

Story and themes

The film has almost no plot in the conventional sense. Its three main characters meet at Mont Saint-Michel and hold a long conversation while walking around the island and its abbey.

Sonia represents the systems perspective of the book. She explains ideas from quantum mechanics and particle physics, the limits of the machine metaphor, and the systems view of life. Jack brings the perspective of conventional politics after his electoral defeat, and Tom brings a poet's view, so that the systems perspective is questioned from two directions. The conversation covers political and social problems and possible alternatives, but it focuses more on ways of seeing than on specific policies. At the end, Tom recites Pablo Neruda's poem "Enigmas," in Robert Bly's English translation, which closes the core discussion.

The dramatic structure works as a way of testing the book's ideas. Instead of presenting the systems view as a lecture, the film lets a politician and a poet push back against it.

Release and reception

Mindwalk premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 1990. Triton Pictures acquired it for distribution in April 1991, and it opened in a limited US release. Michael Wilmington, reviewing it for the Los Angeles Times in 1991, called it an "unusually good-looking movie" and praised the lead actors, but felt that its dense dialogue would challenge viewers and that it would mostly appeal to people who already shared its ecological views. Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, writing for Spirituality and Practice, praised its approach to science, history, politics and the Gaia hypothesis as a "real treat" for like-minded viewers. Byars and Fritjof Capra were nominated for Best Screenplay at the 7th Independent Spirit Awards.

The film has had a long afterlife in classrooms and discussion groups, partly because it presents a complex set of ideas in an accessible, conversational form.

Influence and legacy

On Capra's own work

The Turning Point marked Capra's move from comparing physics with mysticism to building a general systems view of life. The project continued in The Web of Life (1996), which drew more heavily on theories of self-organisation from biology and chemistry; The Hidden Connections (2002), which applied the systems view to social organisations and globalisation; and The Systems View of Life (2014), written with Pier Luigi Luisi as a comprehensive textbook. His educational work through the Center for Ecoliteracy, which promotes ecology and systems thinking in schools, can be seen as an attempt to bring about the change in perception that The Turning Point called for.

On health and other fields

The book's chapter on health drew academic attention long after publication. A 2009 article in the journal Health SA Gesondheid, by T. G. J. C. Kirsten, Van Der Walt and Viljoen, examined Capra's approach to health and well-being and the paradigm shift he advocated. Educators, management writers and ecologists have also drawn on the book's vocabulary of systems, networks and paradigm shifts.

On popular thought

The book's phrases, especially "paradigm shift," "systems thinking," "holistic" and "crisis of perception," became part of the general language of ecological and alternative movements. Its influence on popular thought is probably greater than its influence on mainstream science, where reductionist research has continued to be productive, as its critics predicted.

Common misconceptions

"The Turning Point is a book about The Tao of Physics"

It builds on The Tao of Physics but is a different and broader book. It spends relatively little time on Eastern mysticism and much more on medicine, psychology, economics and ecology.

"Capra rejected science"

Capra is a trained physicist, and the book's argument rests on science, specifically on his interpretation of 20th-century physics. His target is a particular philosophy of science, mechanistic reductionism, not science itself. Critics such as Gould and Havender argued that he misread both physics and the value of reductionism, but that is a dispute within the scientific worldview, not a rejection of it.

"The film Mindwalk is a straight adaptation"

Mindwalk is based on a short story by Bernt Capra, which was in turn based on the book. It turns the book's ideas into a three-way conversation between fictional characters, and it gives sceptical characters room to object. It does not follow the book's chapter structure.

"Holism means everything is in harmony"

This was one of Gould's main objections. A holistic, hierarchical view of nature can recognise that different levels, such as genes, organisms and ecosystems, have conflicting interests. The systems view does not, by itself, imply a harmonious world.

"The book has nothing to do with the 1977 film The Turning Point"

That is correct, and the confusion is common. The 1977 film called The Turning Point, directed by Herbert Ross, is a ballet drama with no connection to Capra's book. Searches for "The Turning Point" also turn up unrelated titles, so it is worth using the full subtitle, Science, Society, and the Rising Culture.

How to read the book today

Readers coming to The Turning Point now may find it useful to read it in three ways at once:

• As a historical document of the ecological and holistic movements of the 1970s and early 1980s, showing how those movements tried to unite around a common theory.
• As an introduction to systems thinking, which has since become a standard tool in fields such as ecology, public health and organisational management.
• As an argument to be tested, alongside critical reviews such as Gould's in The New York Review of Books and Havender's in Reason, and with awareness that the physics it relies on has been questioned.

Reading the book together with its critics gives a far clearer picture than reading either alone.

Frequently asked questions

Who wrote The Turning Point?

Fritjof Capra, an Austrian-born American physicist and systems theorist born in Vienna in 1939, best known for The Tao of Physics (1975).

When was it published?

In 1982. Kirkus Reviews lists a release date of 3 March 1982 for the Simon and Schuster hardcover. A Bantam paperback followed in 1983.

What is the book's main argument?

That crises in health, economics, ecology and politics share a common cause, an outdated mechanistic worldview inherited from Descartes and Newton, and that a holistic, ecological systems view is emerging to replace it.

What does the subtitle "the rising culture" mean?

It refers to the movements Capra saw as carrying the new worldview, including ecology, feminism, holistic health and alternative energy, which he predicted would rise as older institutions declined.

Where does the title come from?

From a hexagram of the I Ching usually translated as "Return," which some translations call "The Turning Point," describing light returning after a time of decay.

What is Mindwalk?

A 1990 film directed by Bernt Capra, co-written by Floyd Byars and Fritjof Capra, and based on the book. Liv Ullmann, Sam Waterston and John Heard play a physicist, a politician and a poet who discuss its ideas while walking around Mont Saint-Michel. Philip Glass wrote the score.

Was the book well received?

Opinions were split. Some reviewers praised its clarity and breadth, while others, including Stephen Jay Gould, Kirkus Reviews and Reason magazine, criticised it for overreach, contested physics and vagueness. It was nonetheless widely read and influential in ecological and holistic circles.

What did Capra write next?

Among other books, The Web of Life (1996), The Hidden Connections (2002) and, with Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life (2014).

Sources

• The Turning Point (book) (Wikipedia))
• Fritjof Capra (Wikipedia)
• Mindwalk (Wikipedia)
• Kirkus Reviews: The Turning Point by Fritjof Capra
• Stephen Jay Gould, "Utopia (Limited)", The New York Review of Books, 3 March 1983
• William R. Havender, "Moxibustion, Indeed!", Reason, December 1982
• Kuldip Singh Dhir, "Ground-breaking work", The Tribune (India)
• The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (LibraryThing)
• Turning Point (disambiguation, Wikipedia)