by John Gribbin
That moment still lay ahead in the spring of 1982. The Tuvan scheme showed no signs of getting off the ground, and the world seemed to be in a mess, with Argentina invading the Falkland Islands and Israel invading southern Lebanon. To alleviate the gloom, in June Leighton took Feynman to Las Vegas for a belated sixty-fourth birthday present. To their delight, the hotel provided complimentary ‘funbooks’ of coupons that could be used to make bets. To their even greater delight, after betting with all the vouchers in their books they had made a profit of some $50, and were careful to make no further bets. But as they were leaving the hotel, a couple of days later, they found that their key deposit could be returned to them in the form of funbooks, instead of cash. Off they went to the gaming tables, and started winning again – only to be requested, in no uncertain terms, to leave the table. There were still some vouchers left in the funbooks – but they could proudly boast to their friends when they got home that they had been sent away from the tables in Las Vegas for winning too much.7
It was an adventure just like the ones that Feynman told Leighton about during their drumming sessions. Not long after, Leighton went to Esalen with Feynman for the first time, to teach drumming as a kind of antidote to the heavy physics involved in Feynman’s lectures on ‘The Quantum Mechanical View of Reality’. The material covered some of the same ground that he was to cover early in 1983 at UCLA as the Alix G. Mautner Memorial Lectures, and which was turned into a book by Ralph Leighton (continuing the family practice which his father, Robert Leighton, described as ‘translating lectures from Feynmanese into English’).
Those lectures came about through Feynman’s lifetime friendship with Leonard Mautner, one of his boyhood companions and a fellow mathematics enthusiast from Far Rockaway. Like Feynman, Mautner ended up on the West Coast, but in his case at UCLA; Mautner’s wife, Alix, was a specialist in English literature, but had a keen interest in science, and often asked Feynman to explain things to her, in a friendship lasting more than twenty years. But he never had time to get to grips fully with an explanation of quantum electrodynamics for her, and promised that one day he would prepare a series of popular lectures on the subject, that she could attend.8 Eventually, he had an opportunity to prepare just such a set of lectures and, as he put it, ‘try them out’, when he was invited to visit New Zealand at the end of the 1970s. He gave a variation on the theme on a visit to Crete in the early 1980s, as well as using the material at Esalen, polishing his performance all the time. The lectures went well, but in 1982, before he could put on the definitive performance in Los Angeles for his friend, Alix died. So the lectures on QED at UCLA in 1983 became the first of the Alix G. Mautner Memorial Lectures.
They were the ultimate Feynman lectures – the master himself, at the height of his powers as a showman, explaining in simple, everyday language the work for which he had won the Nobel Prize, and which remains the jewel in the crown of theoretical physics. The kind of showman (or shaman!) Feynman was was explained in an obituary that appeared in Scientific American in June 1988:
The actor on the stage pretends to be who he is not, by artful empathy and the words of another. That was not Richard’s way. His theater – and it is impossible to evoke him without the word ‘theatrical’ – was on the other side. Richard’s was the stage where dancers, wire walkers and magicians daringly perform. What they do is striking, and not dissembled or illusory. It is real, expressing mastery of some challenge, trivial or urgent, posed by nature and by human perceptions. On that stage he performed in four real dimensions.9
Nowhere was this mastery of a challenge more evident than in those lectures on QED. The resulting book, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, is a masterpiece of clarity, even though it pulls no punches and describes QED the way it really is, without sacrificing accuracy for simplicity. Leighton’s role as Feynman’s scribe was established by the success of the collaboration on QED, but by the time the book was published (by Princeton University Press in 1985) it had been overtaken by Surely You’re Joking, which Leighton had worked up from the tapes of his drumming sessions with Feynman in 1984, and which was also published (by Norton) in 1985.
The publishers demonstrated little real enthusiasm for the book, offering an advance of just $1,500, and printing only a modest number of copies for the first edition. They were astonished when it became a bestseller. A few of Feynman’s colleagues were disappointed by the seemingly frivolous tone of his anecdotes, even though he was always careful to say that that was all the book was – a set of anecdotes, not an autobiography. But thousands of people who never knew that physics could be fun were excited and intrigued by the book, and many of Feynman’s old friends recognized the truth underlying his colourful stories – the truth about not fooling yourself, and always being honest. Someone who knew Feynman well enough to be a good judge of the honesty of the book, and its sequel What Do You Care (published after Feynman’s death) is Freeman Dyson, who described them as providing ‘a complete picture of Feynman in his own words’. Referring to the occasion when they shared a room in a brothel together and discussed life and physics, Dyson comments ‘his version is different from the version I wrote to my parents. In deference to my parents’ Victorian sensibilities, I left out the best part of the story. Feynman’s version is better.’10 Feynman, of course, would never leave out the best part of a story for the benefit of anybody’s sensibilities, which is why his anecdotes ruffled a few feathers. And Dyson puts his finger on a fundamental reason for Feynman’s integrity and sometimes uncomfortable insistence on always calling a spade a spade – ‘Arline’s spirit stayed with him all his life and helped to make him what he was, a great scientist and a great human being.’
Ralph Leighton summed up Feynman’s approach to storytelling in 1995:
Feynman would relate a story which would require several re-tellings to get it right. I don’t think he would change a fact or invent something that didn’t happen. But I know that he engaged the reaction of the listener, and developed the story, the impact, the effectiveness, as a good storyteller does. It just happens that the material of his stories involved himself. But most importantly, they had a kind of point to them … I think he went about them in the way the Dalai Lama does, and other great teachers, which is to teach you when you don’t even realize you’re being taught – through humour. Underlying all this is a philosophy, that it’s good to have different points of view, to have a surprise at something being not the way you thought, to have authoritative figures make buffoons of themselves, so you will not be afraid of them, but can stand up to them; and not to believe what someone says just because he’s wearing a uniform, or whatever.11
Feynman received an enormous amount of fan mail as a result of the book, all of which was opened and read by Helen Tuck. Feynman himself was too busy, and soon too ill, to handle much of it personally, although she was careful to pass on anything that needed a response. She recalls12 that out of ‘boxes and boxes’ of mail there was only one letter expressing dissatisfaction with the book. It came from ‘an old lady, bless her heart, in Long Beach … I think that was the only letter that came in that was really unhappy, and she was sorry she’d spent the money. So he actually sent her a cheque for the money, and he wrote her a nice letter.’
Leighton’s tapes include many conversations that never made it into the books. In one, Feynman discusses his medical condition. He had been over to the Huntington Medical Library, to read up on the kidney – he only had one, now, and it was beginning to cause problems. ‘It’s all interesting, how the kidney works, and everything else’, he said. ‘You want me to tell you some interesting things? The damn kidney is the craziest thing in the world!’13 In fact, Feynman became so absorbed by how the kidney works that the library closed before he got on to reading about his own particular problem, and he had to return another day for that.
Cancer and potential kidney failure were not Feynman’s only medical problems. Like his father, he had high blood pressure; he also suffe
red from hypoglycaemia and a recurring arrhythmia of the heart. One attack of arrhythmia occurred when he was at Esalen with Ralph. Feynman called his doctor back in Pasadena, who said that although Feynman wasn’t in any immediate danger, he should get back to Pasadena at once for a check-up. Before they left, someone who Ralph describes as a ‘hippie doctor’ at Esalen prescribed his own course of treatment, urging Feynman to drink a large amount of fizzy pop, which he did. Ralph and Dick had driven only a little way down the road when Feynman produced a large burp, and his heartbeat settled down into its normal pattern. He happily abandoned the trip back to Pasadena, and they returned to Esalen, to the delight of the hippie doctor, who was able to tell everyone how effective his treatment had been, with no recourse to drugs.
On another occasion, a major medical problem was, in a sense, self-inflicted. Feynman had gone downtown to collect one of the first IBM personal computers, jumped out of his car and stumbled across the sidewalk, hitting his head on the wall of the building. He cut his head severely enough to go to the hospital for stitches, but otherwise seemed OK. Over the next few weeks, though, he started behaving strangely.14 He wandered about in the middle of the night for no good reason, and once spent three-quarters of an hour looking for his car, which was parked right outside the house. After three weeks, the problem reached crisis level, when Feynman was giving a lecture at Caltech and suddenly realized that he was talking complete nonsense (and nobody in the audience had had the courage to tell him, as he would have done if the situation had been reversed). He apologized to the audience, and went off to the hospital, where a brain scan showed that slow bleeding inside his skull had led to a build-up of pressure affecting his brain. The remedy was simple – two holes drilled into his skull let the fluid out and relieved the pressure on his brain. Next day, he was sitting up in bed, mentally alert, completely his old self – except that he had no memory of the three weeks that had passed since the accident. He greatly enjoyed telling friends, ‘feel here; I really have got holes in my head!’
That autumn, though, Feynman was able to revive his oldest, and one of his closest, personal relationships. His sister Joan had spent most of her life in the eastern United States, where she had married, had had children, and a career. By the beginning of 1984 the last of her children had left home and she was living alone. In Most of the Good Stuff, she recalls how one February day in 1984 she was looking out of the window at the falling snow:
When the thought came to me ‘What am I doing here? Where would I rather be?’ Richard already had cancer and I realized that if I ever was going to spend more time with him it had better be soon. So I called some friends at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and told them I wanted to come out. I was lucky and the next fall I joined the lab and rekindled the relationship with Richard.
She found that he hadn’t changed much. Although older and more famous (at least among scientists), he was just as excited with life and science as he had always been, and still as ready to laugh:
All his life, he had done physics for fun and he was still doing it for fun. He said that when people asked him how long he worked each week, he really couldn’t say, because he never knew when he was working and when he was playing.
Joan became part of the Feynmans’ domestic scene in Pasadena, visiting the family for a meal every Thursday night, and spending long hours talking with her brother, or going for long weekend walks with him.
1984 had been a year of several failed schemes in the quest for Tuva. The following year, heady with the success of Surely You’re Joking and QED, Leighton decided to travel, with a Russian-speaking friend Glen Cowan, to the Soviet Union, to see first hand the obstacles that he and Feynman were facing in trying to reach Tuva. This was still in the ‘Evil Empire’ days, but the pair enjoyed a series of Feynmanesque adventures, recounted in Tuva or Bust! At the end of their trip, they made contact, in Moscow, with Sevyan Vainshtein, the author of one of the books they had acquired about Tannu Tuva, and with whom Feynman had been in correspondence. Vainshtein had what is surely the ultimate Feynman anecdote: when Vainshtein had been travelling in a remote part of western Tuva he once met a young woman, sitting outside a yurt (the traditional tented home of the nomadic people of the region), reading a book. She was studying to be a teacher, and the book she was reading was The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
The Russian translation of the Lectures had, it turned out, been the biggest success ever of the Mir publishing house, with more than a million copies sold over the previous twenty years. Feynman, of course, received no income from this, which was essentially a pirated edition; but this was no loss, since he never received any royalties from the original editions and official translations, either. Since the lectures had been given as part of his duties at Caltech, all the income from the books went to Caltech itself – a not entirely unreasonable arrangement, since for more than twenty years Feynman was, as we have mentioned, the highest paid member of the Caltech faculty. Not that he cared a fig about the pay, as long as he had enough to live on. What was much more important to him was that he was exempted from serving on faculty committees and the like – that he really did not have any ‘responsible position’.
Vainshtein was an ethnographer, and Leighton and Cowan learned from him about an exhibition called ‘On the Silk Road’, which had been to Japan in 1982 and Finland earlier in 1985, exhibiting artefacts associated with the people that lived near the ancient Silk Road between Europe and China. Many of the pieces came from Tuva, and some of them had been found by Vainshtein himself. The exhibition would be going to Sweden in 1986. Leighton realized that he had been handed the perfect opportunity to make the Tuva dream come true. ‘After Sweden,’ he told his host, in one of the many obligatory toasts of vodka, ‘the exhibition will come to the United States – and as members of the host museum, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton and Glen Cowan will visit Tuva with Sevyan Vainshtein!’15
In the summer of 1985, Feynman made his own last major trip abroad, to Japan. There had been a longstanding invitation for him to visit the University of Tokyo, but illness had prevented him from taking up the invitation before. Now, he was to be one of the chairmen of a conference held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the work by Hideki Yukawa which predicted the existence of the family of particles known as mesons. It was largely an honorary job, since there would be two Japanese-speaking co-chairmen to ensure that things actually ran smoothly, but it was a great excuse for Richard to travel to Japan with Gweneth. They travelled widely, staying for some time in a tiny Japanese-style inn in the countryside, with no concessions to Western habits, just the way they liked it. After a perfect holiday, they returned to California at the end of August.
Nothing happened on the Tuva front until February 1986, when Leighton decided, on the spur of the moment, to go to Sweden to check out the Silk Road exhibition. Glen Cowan agreed to come along, but Feynman had just accepted the invitation to serve on the inquiry into the Challenger disaster, and was not available. While Feynman was finding out about the effect of cold on the shuttle O rings, Leighton was making contact with the exhibition organizers, and learning about the bureaucratic hoops they would have to jump through at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in order to get the exhibition to the United States. The main thing the exhibition people were interested in was ensuring that a large number of Soviet delegates would get a chance to travel to America with the exhibits; the way at last seemed clear for Feynman to visit Tuva.
If only Feynman had been there to share the pleasure of making the breakthrough, the happiness of Leighton and Cowan would have been complete. Then, that evening, they switched on the local Swedish TV to watch the news. ‘Suddenly, there was the Chief, holding a little C-clamp in his hand, explaining something. For us, it was the icing on the cake; the third musketeer of the Tuva trio had suddenly appeared in Sweden after all.’16
On his return to Los Angeles, Leighton went to the Natural History Museum to see if they would be willing to host the
exhibition, taking along with him some catalogues from the Swedish version of the show. The museum representatives were cautiously interested, but asked what the participation fee to the Soviet Academy of Sciences would be. There isn’t one, Leighton explained – apart from the cost of hosting fourteen Soviet representatives and taking them to Disneyland. The museum people were a bit more interested. And what about a finder’s fee for Leighton and his colleagues? ‘Nothing’, he replied. He explained their burning desire to get to Tannu Tuva. He was among fellow enthusiasts for exotic places, who immediately understood. There were no problems; the museum’s director soon approved the project.
Feynman finished his work on the shuttle Commission in June 1986, and returned looking ‘tired and haggard’, in Leighton’s words. But with everything fixed up at the American end, the whole Tuva project now hinged upon getting the required protocol through friends at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In September, Feynman was best man at Ralph’s marriage to Phoebe Kwan; a week later, Dr Morton was performing another major operation. On their return from honeymoon, Ralph and Phoebe visited Feynman at the UCLA Medical Center, where he was recuperating. While they were there, two representatives from the Natural History Museum also came by, to bring Feynman up to date on progress. Everything was agreed. The exhibition would be coming to Los Angeles in January 1989 – and the protocol specifically included a provision for representatives of the American side to go out to Tuva in the summer of 1988 to make a film of the sites where the artefacts had been found, to accompany the exhibition. Feynman was delighted. Once again, he was being recognized as an expert in something he was not supposed to know about. ‘You see, man?’, he told his friend, ‘We’re professionals. We’re finders of international exhibitions!’17 Together with Ralph and Glen, he was officially enrolled as a Research Associate of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.