To the Reader
An excerpt from…
Tuva or Bust!
Richard Feynman’s Last Journey
by Ralph Leighton
RICHARD P. FEYNMAN (1918-1988) was an illustrious professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from the early 1950s through the late 1980s. Upon graduation from Princeton he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. To entertain himself he perfected his safecracking abilities—at one point opening the combination locks behind which lay all the secrets to the atomic bomb—and left notes scrawled in red pointing out the laxity of security in the government’s most secret project.
Near the end of his life he was again recruited by the government, this time to serve on the Rogers Commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Again, Feynman entertained himself in a way that sent shock waves through the establishment: at a public hearing he squeezed a piece of rubber “O-ring” with a C-clamp and dipped them into a glass of ice water. His “little experiment” to show the rubber’s lack of resilience at cold temperatures stripped away NASA’s attempts at obfuscation and revealed the primary cause of the accident.
Because he was a colleague of my father, who edited The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Feynman occasionally visited our home. One time, when I was in high school, my musician friend Thomas Rutishauser happened to be over. Having heard that Feynman was an accomplished drummer, we asked him to join us.
”I didn’t bring my drums,” he said.
”That’s ok,” I said. “You can use one of these small tables here.”
Intrigued by their sound, and perhaps also attracted to the rhythms Tom and I were playing, the professor grabbed a small table for himself and joined in. Thus began some of the happiest times of my life: the three of us would meet every week for a session of drumming—on tables, bongos, and congas—interspersed with breaks during which Feynman would recount one of his amazing adventures.
A dozen years ago I fell into one of these adventures myself. While I was not accompanied at every turn by the “curious character” (as Feynman liked to describe himself), I gradually became infected with his zest for life on every level—especially his passion for the unexpected. As it turned out, most of what happened on our quest got us no closer to our goal. But had we not embarked on the journey, we would have missed it all.
Feynman compared his adventures to fishing: one must wait patiently for long periods of time before something interesting happens. I never heard of Feynman actually going fishing. Had he gone out on a lake with a fishing pole, I’m sure he would affirm what many anglers already know: you will be disappointed only if you decide beforehand that you’re going fishing in order to catch a fish.
As with life, I think this story will be enjoyed most if the reader does not decide beforehand what it is about.
Pasadena, California
Shagaa, 1991
