[1]Bohr adopted the yin yang symbol as part of his coat of arms when he was knighted in 1947;[2] it is claimed in the book that it was a result of orientalist influences.

The Tao of Physics was followed by other books of the same genre like The Hidden Connection, The Turning Point and The Web of Life in which Capra extended the argument of how Eastern mysticism and scientific findings of today relate, and how Eastern mysticism might also have the linguistic and philosophical tools required to undertake to some of the biggest scientific challenges remaining.

What no one needs, in my opinion, is this superficial and profoundly misleading book.Leon M. Lederman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and current Director Emeritus of Fermilab, criticized both The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters in his 1993 book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

[9] Starting with reasonable descriptions of quantum physics, he constructs elaborate extensions, totally bereft of the understanding of how carefully experiment and theory are woven together and how much blood, sweat, and tears go into each painful advance.Philosopher of science Eric Scerri criticizes both Capra and Zukav and similar books.

[10] Peter Woit, a mathematical physicist at Columbia University, criticized Capra for continuing to build his case for physics-mysticism parallels on the bootstrap model of strong-force interactions set out at the end of the book,[6] long after the Standard Model had become thoroughly accepted by physicists as a better model:[11] The Tao of Physics was completed in December 1974, and the implications of the November Revolution one month earlier that led to the dramatic confirmations of the standard-model quantum field theory clearly had not sunk in for Capra (like many others at that time).

What is harder to understand is that the book has now gone through several editions, and in each of them Capra has left intact the now out-of-date physics, including new forewords and afterwords that with a straight face deny what has happened.

In fact, most of them were anticipated in the original edition," a statement far from any relation to the reality that in 1983 the standard model was nearly universally accepted in the physics community, and the bootstrap theory was a dead idea ...

The bootstrap philosophy, despite its complete failure as a physical theory, lives on as part of an embarrassing New Age cult, with its followers refusing to acknowledge what has happened.In a 2019 commemoration in honour of physicist Geoffrey Chew, one of bootstrap's "fathers", Capra replied to criticisms such as Woit's: However, the standard model does not include gravity, and hence fails to integrate all known particles and forces into a single mathematical framework.

If these difficulties persist, and if a theory of "quantum gravity" continues to remain elusive, the bootstrap idea may well be revived someday, in some mathematical formulation or other.