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
Richard Feynman: The Story Behind the Stamp
Kate Repantis Mar 23, 2015
From MITALUMNI
The US Postal Service announced the issue of a stamp honoring 1965 Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman ’39 on August 14, 2004. The day of the announcement was the independence day of Tannu Tuva, and it wasn’t a coincidence. Feynman and his friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton had spent years trying to visit this small central Asian country near Mongolia.
It all started with a stamp.
In the 1920s and 30s, Tannu Tuva’s uniquely shaped diamond and triangle-shaped stamps were in high demand among stamp collectors. “Stamp designers were working away on these wonderful idyllic themes…which were firing the imaginations of kids around the world,” said Leighton.
As one of those young stamp enthusiasts, Feynman became entranced by Tuvan stamps’ dramatic illustrations of camels racing trains, horse wranglers, and cattle mongers against otherworldly, mountainous scenes.
Fifty years later, Leighton and Feynman had a dinner conversation about geography, and Feynman mentioned his love of Tuvan stamps. The pair decided to travel to Tuva, which turned into an 11-year quest detailed in Leighton’s book Tuva or Bust! In a documentary about their plans, Feynman said of Tannu Tuva, “any country with a capital Kyzyl has just got to be interesting….we had discovered our Shangri-La.”
The pair learned phrases of the Tuvan language, dreamed up crossing the border from Mongolia in shepherds’ disguises, acquired a rare recording of a Tuvan throat singer—Tuva is famous for this unique type of overtone music—and collaborated on a traveling exhibition of nomadic culture that turned out to be the largest ever from the Soviet Union. Feynman never made it to Tuva—he died in 1988—but Leighton and his wife were finally able to visit a few months later.
Getting to the country was no small feat. At the time, Tuva was under the rule of the USSR and was rumored to be a testing ground for atomic bomb research. “I’m sure we were being watched,” recalls Leighton. “People couldn’t figure out why these guys would want to go to Tuva, especially someone who worked on the bomb.” (Feynman famously worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos)
After Feynman died, Leighton launched another years-long campaign with his organization Friends of Tuva to petition the US Postal Service to honor his friend with a commemorative stamp. But not just any stamp—a diamond-shaped Tuvan stamp.
“We definitely wanted to make a connection between Feynman stamp collecting, Tuva, and a US postage stamp,” said Leighton. In one tongue-and-cheek mock-up stamp they dreamed up, Feynman is dressed as a shaman holding elements of his famous Feynman diagram with Tuvan throat singer Kongar-ol Ondar.
Thousands of letters and many signed petitions later, the Postal Service ultimately decided to feature Feynman in a stamp series on American scientists.
Friends of Tuva
Friends of Tuva (FoT) was conceived by accident in 1981 to commemorate Tuva's 60th anniversary as a distinctive splotch on the world globe. Because FoT is a brainchild of Ralph Leighton, it is impossible that it could even resemble an organization. Rather, it has been a clearinghouse of information about Tuva and its "patron saint," Richard Feynman, who collected Tuvan stamps as a boy — and as an adult wondered,
"Whatever happened
to
Tannu Tuva?"
FoT is unfunded and so has no affiliation with any government or religious institution. As there are no dues, meetings, or even a membership list, those who would like to consider themselves as Friends of Tuva should simply spread the word about this magical country, and celebrate Richard Feynman's spirit of adventure.
NEWS
June 18, 2014: On the night before his return to Tuva after riding in the Rose Parade in 2013, Kongar-ol Ondar recorded some tracks impromptu for Dirtwire artists Evan Fraser and David Satori, who are big Ondar / Tuva fans.
The result can be heard at https://dirtwireondar.bandcamp.com/album/ondar-ep
You can find more of Ondar's music, along with recordings of the godfather of the Tuva adventure, Richard Feynman, at http://kongar-olondar.bandcamp.com
The remixes of Dirtwire might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I like them a lot -- and I know Ondar was always keen to expand the horizons of his artistry and the reach of Tuvan music (witness Genghis Blues and Back TUVA Future), so I'm sure he would have enjoyed this EP.
What a tragedy that Ondar left us so soon -- he had so much energy, it seems his body couldn't hold it!
Tuvanly yours,
RL
Saving the Feynman Van
Kathryn Jepsen May 08, 2014
Symmetry Magazine
A team of Richard Feynman’s friends and fans banded together to restore the Nobel laureate’s most famous vehicle.
“The game I play is a very interesting one,” says Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman in a low-resolution video posted to YouTube. “It’s imagination in a tight straitjacket.”
Feynman is describing his job as a theoretical physicist: to lay out what humanity knows about how the world works, and to search the spaces in between for what we might have missed.
The video shows more than Feynman's way with words. It shows his approachability. One of the greatest minds that particle physics has ever known stands barefoot, lecturing in a distinct Queens, New York, accent for an audience lounging casually on the floor at the new-age Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
In a way, Feynman remains approachable to this day for all of the snippets of his personality left behind in books, letters and recordings of formal and informal lectures and interviews.
Recently, a more concrete bit of Feynman history came out of retirement: A small team has brought back to life the so-called “Feynman van.”
One camper, special order
In 1975, Feynman and his wife, Gweneth Howarth, bought a Dodge Tradesman Maxivan and had it painted with Feynman diagrams, symbols Feynman had invented to express complicated particle interactions through simple lines and loops.
It might seem arrogant to drive around in a van covered in reminders of one’s own intellectual prowess. But Feynman's daughter, Michelle, thinks the decorations represented something else: a love of physics.
“My dad was pretty low-key about himself,” she says. “I think decorating the van was more to celebrate the diagrams than to celebrate himself.”
Michelle's parents put a lot of thought into the design of the vehicle, which they primarily used for camping, Michelle says. It was outfitted with a small hammock for Michelle to use in case the family of four needed to sleep inside during inclement weather.
“I don’t think that they had ever done anything like that with a car purchase before,” Michelle says. “It was always: Go to the dealer and find something—it doesn’t really matter what color it is—and you’ll have it for a million years.”
The Feynman family took the van to Canada, Mexico and dozens of US campsites in between, often traveling with a couple of other families, often leaving the paved road for the unknown.
Michelle began driving the van to school after she turned 16.
“I thought it was kind of embarrassing,” she says. “But at a certain point I kind of got over it. If you want to drive at that age, you’ll drive anything.”
After Michelle’s first couple of years in college, one of her father’s friends, film producer Ralph Leighton—Feynman’s drumming partner in another famous fuzzy YouTube clip—bought the van and put it into storage, where it began to rust and fade.
Saving the Feynman van
When video game designer Seamus Blackley, known as the father of the Xbox, got ahold of the van in 2012, “it was just about too late,” Blackley says.
Blackley has a history with particle physics. He was in his early 20s, working on his PhD thesis at Tufts University and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, when he saw his plans for the future disintegrate with the defunding of the planned Superconducting Super Collider.
“I found out on CNN,” he says.
He changed course and wound up taking a job working on some of the first computer games with 3D graphics. He designed the physics of the game environments, “keeping things from going into other things.” He has helped shape the world of video games in a variety of different roles since.
Game design takes the same type of thinking Feynman described in his talk at the Esalen Institute, Blackley says. A designer must creatively solve problems without breaking the rules that keep the environment realistic—“and then you have to have a lot of intuition about how to make it fun.”
In 2005, Blackley moved to Pasadena, California, just miles from where Leighton was keeping Feynman’s van. Oblivious to his proximity to the famous camper, Blackley nonetheless began to make a hobby of restoring classic Italian cars.
It was fellow Pasadena resident Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, who told him about the van in 2012. Blackley knew right away that he had to help save it.
“The universe is telling me I’ve gotta do this,” he says.
With the help of Leighton and Shermer, along with a donation from Feynman fan and world-class designer Edward Tufte, Blackley registered the van as a historic vehicle and brought it to his preferred restoration specialists in Los Angeles.
The van’s Feynman diagrams, which were painted poorly in the first place, turned out to be too degraded for restoration. So a pinstriper re-painted them, taking care to replicate the quality of the original work.
“It looks like this crappy job again,” Blackley says with a smile. “You see the brush marks and everything.”
After the restoration, Blackley prepared to ship the van across the country for a Feynman-themed exhibit by Tufte, held at Fermilab.
Keeping the Feynman spirit alive
The test of whether the specialists had stayed true to the original came when Blackley invited Michelle to come see the van before its next big trip. She came with her 11- and 13-year-old children.
It didn’t look brand new, Michelle says, but it was as if it had been rewound 30 years, back to the days when her father was still in the driver’s seat. She told Blackley and her kids about the times her father slept on the floor below her hammock.
“As a father now, you appreciate what that means,” says Blackley, who has an 11-year-old son.
A camping van incongruously covered in physics notations seems to be a fitting symbol for a man who couldn’t seem to help thinking about particle physics, Michelle says.
“I think it was impossible for him to turn it off,” she says. “I remember in the car there was a Kleenex box, and the back of it had been used for equations. Every little piece of paper and every waking moment was fair game.”
Richard Feynman died of cancer in 1988 at the age of 69. But projects like the van restoration keep his memory alive, Michelle says.
“He would’ve been an amazing grandfather, and he never had the opportunity,” she says. “So I’m thrilled that there are so many people around who want to share his spirit and his life so my kids can get a sense of who he is.”