FEYNMAN: THE QUEST FOR TANNU TUVA (1988)

[Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] the new york times wednesday 17th of february 1988. richard feynman arguably the most brilliant iconoclastic and influential of the post-war generation of theoretical physicists died of abdominal cancer in los angeles on monday night he was 69 years old the way i think of what we're doing is we're exploring we're trying to find out as much as we can about the world people say to me are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics no i'm not i'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything so be it that would be very nice to discover if it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers then that's the way it is but whatever way it comes out its nature is there and she's going to come out the way she is and therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we're trying to do except to find out more about it if you say but your problem is why do you find out more about if you thought that you were trying to find out more about it because you're going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question you may be wrong it may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature but i don't look at my my interest in science is to simply find out about the world and the more i find out the better it is i'd like to find out feinman disliked writing and his autobiography an informal collection of remarkable adventures inside and outside science was edited from tape recordings made by his friend ralph layton i opened the shapes which contained behind them the entire secret of the atomic bomb i had the feeling of of jewels slipping through my fingers i couldn't believe how many crazy things he had done he was full of surprises he also had an acceptance of so many different kinds of people he didn't make me feel like i'm some kind of small infinitesimal intellect i found it in fact kind of odd that my father who's a professor of physics and who edited his lectures was uncomfortable with feynman because he was able to appreciate how much more feynman knew or what kinds of insights feynman was capable of and felt himself quite inadequate in the presence of firemen i being so oblivious to all of this was more relaxed two weeks before feynman died we recorded a conversation at his house in los angeles on a home video camera he talked about his many adventures with ralph including their 10-year obsession with a strange and remote country called tanyu he's a very good friend of mine i like to tease him a little and he would have been teaching arithmetic and algebra rather to his in high school and then he told us that he's got they gave him a geography class i know that he would do a fairly good job in geography because he listens to the short wave and therefore he gets a pretty good feel where everything is nevertheless i wanted to tease him so i said oh you know all about geography huh and he said he answered yeah you listen show me i said okay whatever happened to tanutuba because as a matter of fact it was in the back of my head always i knew that there was this country when i was a kid that my father explained to me was an independent country that had these interesting stamps i think he had shown me on the map where it was and it was a purple area in the middle some big green thing in the middle of asia somewhere and uh as time went on i never heard of it again and it's supposed to be an independent country so it must have disappeared somehow and so in the back of my mind was this question and i said whatever happened to tanner truma because i knew damn well he'd never heard of it and also that he'd think i was kidding him that there was such a thing because i like to tease by that kind of method you're making up a country that doesn't exist and so he said i'm making up a country that doesn't exist oh yeah i say it i got the encyclopedia huh and we looked it up on the map and sure enough there's a 10 or two but and that was a surprise and where was it just outside of out of mongolia in the middle of central asia in the depths of russia far away from anything and it was no longer an independent country it was a part of russia and we saw that the capital this is what did it the capital was k-y-c-y-l my wife and i and he at the same time looked smart grinned at each other because any place that's got a capital named kyzyl just got to be interesting we couldn't get any information at all we at first we started out in san francisco when we were there playing drums for a ballet we had a job and then we would use the spare time to go to the library and we didn't know where to begin so we thought we'd go to travels in central siberia which is right where it is travel central siberia so you're all these books of people traveling in central siberia that nobody went through tuva they went down around below it or they went around above it but whenever they went through central side view they missed it because it was a kind of a bowl and if you went down in you'd have to climb back out and there was no particular reason to go through it it was just in the way so these everybody seemed to dodge it so surprisingly in spite of all these books about travels in central siberia we found no information then one day feinman and ralph came across a rare book published in berlin in 1931 and written by the german historian and explorer otto mentioned helfin i was the first non-russian to set foot in the republic of tuva it took a lot of trouble to obtain permission to go i went as an ethnologist pointing out that ethnologists are as harmless as mushroom connoisseurs or stamp collectors i did not bring with me especially high expectations of kazil but what i encountered was nonetheless astonishing the kazil electric plant works only when the movie theater is running i saw the beautiful podovian film mother there tuvans rode from far and wide to look at this wonder the film broke at least 20 times that night but that only made the audience happy so much better now the fairy tale would last that much longer they couldn't understand anything not the slightest bit the subtitles were in russian they couldn't read them but their pleasure was nevertheless unending [Music] when horses appeared the whole place went crazy they screamed and jumped up they had a magnificent time they didn't worry at all about who was a jean darm and he was a revolutionary because they didn't understand what the fight was about whoever just fired that was their man only once were they incensed and raving i didn't understand the reason the film didn't show anything outlandish running feet a raised arm a face but that was precisely why what they were shouting was translated for me we paid full price why do you show us just a foot where is the head we want to see a whole person why do you make the screen so small we demand a screen on which a whole person has more we want a big screen a big screen big screen [Music] it has everything it's still as far as i know it has everything we had discovered you see a shangri-la place in the world that nobody visited in a long time and so we all right then and there said you got to go there of course all right usually big words signify very small specialties and the quantum electrodynamics is a big word that signifies a very big subject in fact it's nearly all of physics let me explain a little bit about the history of the problem that we three have gotten a no-go prize for the it's the adventure of our science of physics the perpetual is in a perpetual attempt to recognize that the different aspects of nature are really different aspects of the same thing that all the phenomena that you see the great variety of different things can all be explained as uh different aspects of some underlying business or some underlying laws or some underlying simplicity i have won a nobel prize and it is a pain in the neck and it destroys a great deal of the adventure of life for me and it sends and cuts off lots of things i would like to do in a sort of easy way like a normal human being i didn't see that the publicity would be so terrible i didn't want it i knew right away i didn't want to try to figure out how not to get it but like many other people who have gotten it and they realize after a few moments that if they refuse it it would make more publicity than you know if you got the big shot he thinks he is refuses the nobel prize you don't want that either and what i think is the solution to this is that they should at least have the courtesy i mean the swedish academy when they choose somebody to call him up quietly and to offer him the prize and if he doesn't want it he can then say no and there'll be no publicity because nobody has been told yet and it would seem to me a rather simple solution [Music] hey you're not doing it now [Music] we were asked by someone to she wanted to make a drum she wanted to make a ballet of purely percussion music and i thought that's crazy you know i thought ballets were like nothing but swan lake and so forth and so she designed this ballet and we went up to san francisco as if it was a regular job we got paid we went to rehearsals we went to the thing it was extremely small ballet school there weren't more than 20 or 30 people in the audience for this whole ballet okay but it's set on on the program music composed and produced by richard feynman and ralph layton so i have composed music for ballet okay well it turns out crazy like always that she got won a contest in the united states and then went to europe with a section of this ballet and some some dancers and entered a big european a european contest in which it ended up with just two contenders one was a latvian ballet group with swann lake and her thing and it was in paris and she reports that the audience were always applauding more for hers than the other but that the judges decided that the swat lake was better and when she went up to the judges which was permitted to find out what it was that was the weakness they said the music so we were found out you know in paris at last somebody had enough cultural background to recognize the fakers right but then we get so damn far faking it i uh i always find fascinating okay [Music] dear mr layton we have received your letter requesting us to arrange a visit to chuvanskaya we regret to inform you that the subject area is beyond in tourist travel routes therefore we cannot arrange such a visit sincerely in tourist moscow [Music] dear mr layton thank you for your letter of the 3rd of january it is a pleasure to welcome you to tuvan studies your appearance alone must double the number of people in the field unhappily i can offer you very little hope of getting to tuva while there is no harm in going ahead and applying for a visa the obstacles are in my opinion insurmountable it's very simple i propose to give some lectures in russia they would be delighted i think i come there and they say that and i say that one of the conditions is that i travel to tuva and they say indeed it's fine and then i say but i give the lectures in moscow after i visit tula having learned a bit you see and they'll have to say yes to that and i could go i never understood before why i don't want to do it that right and now i suddenly do the whole idea is to have adventure the way to have adventure is to do things at a lower level is not to ride on the freeway and to stop at the holiday inn all this and more at the world famous san bernardino exotic car show this saturday and sunday at the national launcher [Music] could accept oh but now that we had the phrase book we would write in two of it that would probably wake somebody up you see and so we struggle this is the kind of thing i love okay try to put something together so taking all the phrases and trying to make the minimum changes on any of the phrases of the phrase book so that we would have as few errors as possible we would be able to put together the phrases in order to say greetings to your country from ours we have a great interest in in tuva and so on and we hope someday to come to visit and we will look forward to seeing you in greetings and good wishes and and uh if there's any way that you can send us tapes of the language we would appreciate all this kind of stuff and it sounds a little odd that you could make that all out of a phrase book but actually it was a rather good phrase book and had a lot of stuff and so you know phono recordings and things like that so we wrote this letter into the vacuum as usual and nothing happened and nothing happened and then one day ralph comes running over waving the letter a letter in the air he was so excited he didn't open it yet the letter had come from tula with the stamps here russian stamps but uh it can't come from kazil so we opened it and then of course we couldn't read it because it was in tuvan we worked very patiently back and forth because we had to go through the phrase book into russian and then from russian into english his name was andar dairuma greetings from tuva kizil is a nice city you will find we have a statue of the center of asia it was very much fun of course to to do that to discover different ways that they speak and how their language works and so on and that was our first piece of anything that came out of tuva that we received and that was the beginning of hope because it took us a number of years till we got to that stage it's the kind of a puzzle i love it's like deciphering hieroglyphics which i enjoy i spent a lot of time for the fun of it there's a codex mayan codex called the dresden codex which is one of three books left from the hundreds of thousands of books that were extant at the time when the spanish conquered mexico this is the only good one was the dresden codex i knew that that had been translated in 1850 or something by somebody but i loved puzzles and i thought to myself suppose i was forsterman who was the one who translated got a hold of this thing for the first time what would i do you know what did he do i didn't have to but i may believe that i was in the same position it wasn't very difficult because there were bars and dots and pretty soon you guess their numbers and pretty soon you find out five dots is equivalent to a bar and so on and then after that you notice periodicities and funny symbols which are presumably names of days that go like our week does in a period because they were the numbers of the days and the names of the days etc okay it'd work all out and then there'd be some very very puzzling numbers a whole lot of calculations involving multiples of 584 and you can't figure that out what what the heck that is and you get the idea well maybe it's an astronomic thing they're observing and you discover when i went to the library and at cal tech and looked up astronomical numbers the planets but from the point of view of the earth venus appears in the same position in the sky again after 584 days after 583.92 days and uh you have to kind of understand the orbits but you can see that there would be a period where venus would be a morning star about 230 days period when it's an evening star another period of about the same amount but the transition from the morning to the evening star is very quick at one part of the orbit when it's on our side of the sun you pass it quickly when it's on the far side it's a relative angle motion it's very slow so it would look like a longer period where you can't see it because it's too close to the sun at that time when you see all this you see all this fit and you know all of a sudden that you're reading about venus and that they had made all these observations you get one heck of an excitement just like a physics discovery or something even though i know it's all been discovered i didn't know it that's all i was doing it for the fun of it and see what i could discover discovery clips numbers that i finally figured out what the periods of the moon and eclipse prediction tables and things in this thing it was very exciting and that's an example but what i really mean by uh deciphering hieroglyphics is more like cryptograms and puzzles where you have you know this sense behind this damn thing the problem is to extract it with whatever tools and clues you've got that's lots of fun kpfk los angeles it's time for mario cassetta with many worlds of music well how do you happen to come by this record which is a jewel um i wrote to the author of a book about tuva sevjan and he did most of his ethnographic work on tuva and he sent out this amazing record i am most people i talk to think that there is a flute or some other instrument accompanying singer at the same time and they're really astonished when they hear that it's one person making both of those tones [Music] as they're singing there's a kind of a whistle that develops on top of the scene and so it sounds like a man with two [Music] voices ralph has this car which has a license plate says tuba for the fun of it we had the car outside on the street in front here we got some friends of ours to take our picture trying to push this automobile as if it's kind of run out of gas or so up the hill we're faking of course that we're pushing so hard and we got a picture so we sent it to undock and said see how hard we're working to cut the tuber it's too bust or something like that that's a joke and uh he was delighted and took it to the local newspaper in kazil newspaper and they uh printed the picture with a caption that i think we had written actually somewhere along the line we found out that botanists a group of botanists were able to go to tuva it looked to us that they were counting the leaf buds or whatever you do when you're a botanist and we were kind of disappointed that these guys had gotten there ahead of us and also that they hadn't fully appreciated the wonderful place we imagined that they were going to but we got from them the idea that the reason it was egypt to go is that they had something to do so we had to find some kind of a thing that would officially make sense that we had to go to tuba then ralph found out that there was going to be a great throat singing contest and conference for a week somewhere way out in the west edge of mongolia right near tuba you know it was it was a part of mongolia you don't ordinarily go and it was right near tooth of course there were various fancy dreams of our darning old rogues and old rags and so on because we'd meet these guys we'd meet the tubans in mongolia and then they'd carry us back in their wagons and we'd see a part of tuba maybe okay i know we were all excited to go to this we see even if we didn't get to tuba that would have been interesting too you have to understand that every plot even though it was a high chance of failure as far as the ultimate aim was concerned it would always turn out were you supposed to be a big adventure after all it ain't everybody that goes across to visit the throth singing conference in the western part of mongolia so we tried to join up and sign up for this and get everything ready and there was a change in the government and the cultural the minister of culture changed and he decided they weren't going to have a droid singing conference in mongolia so that fell through [Music] yes [Music] [Music] yay [Music] in january 1986 the challenger space shuttle exploded on takeoff feynman was invited to join the presidential commission to investigate the accident i have a policy practically of never going near washington and i called up various friends of mine who were connected to the space program one way or the other and tried to ask them if they didn't see whether i should go or somebody else could do it just as well and they both told me no you'd ought to do it i'm still trying to get out of it i'm talking to my wife and i asked her and i have to be modest here to explain the effect she said well she said i said somebody else could do it she says if you're not on the commission there'll be 12 members in a little knot which will go from one place to the other figure it all out and write a report if you are on this thing there'll be 11 guys you know not going around looking in writing a report and one guy like a mosquito running all over the place and you probably won't find anything but if there's something interesting if there's something strange about it or something like that you'll find it and it wouldn't have been found otherwise well i had to believe her because i know how i act i'm explorer okay i get curious about everything and i want to investigate all kinds of stuff and so i knew she was right and that i had no further excuse because i could make a contribution that not everybody could make could be true untrue it's a certain anyway she used my lack of modesty to convince me to do it and i did it the commission released four internal nasa memos in which mid-level space agency officials had warned of the potential for problems with the o-ring seals when sections of the solid fuel rocket are joined the walls fit together like this and the seal is protected by two resilient rubber o-rings meant to prevent burning fuel from escaping out the side of the rocket nasa officials discounted the possible effect of cold weather on the resiliency of the rubber o-ring on launch day but commission member richard feynman after examining the o-ring had a surprise oh i took this stuff that i got out of your seal and i put it in ice water and i discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it it maintains it doesn't stretch back it stays the same dimension in other words for a few seconds at least and more seconds than that there's no resilience in this particular material when it's at a temperature of 32 degrees i believe that has some significance for our problem dearest gwyneth and michelle this is the first time i have had time to write to you i miss you and may figure out later how i can get a day off and visit this is an adventure as good as some of the others in my book i already smell certain rats that i will not forget because i just love the smell of rats for it is the spore of exciting adventure tuba orbas love richard chairman william rogers personally brought the commission report to the white house this evening earlier in the day he'd been asked about it it's been a long four months are you satisfied with your work well satisfaction is not the right word i think the report is a good plural report but it developed rogers had barely managed to keep his commission completely united one prominent member had threatened not to sign the report that was richard feynman the nobel prize-winning physicist who startled the commission months ago when he dipped an o-ring into his glass of ice water to show that it wouldn't work when it was cold a nasa analysis had projected that the chance of a shuttle accident was only one in a hundred thousand but feynman ridiculed that in a harshly worded critique written for the report but chairman rogers according to other commissioners thought feynman's criticism could be too damaging to nasa and roger said he was going to throw it out of the final report late last week an angry fineman sent a letter to rogers threatening not to sign the report as a matter of conscience at that point rogers and his staff back down somewhat they agreed to include a toned down version of feynman's critique of nasa in an appendix to the report to be published next month feynman's minority report ended with these words nasa owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank honest and informative so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources for a successful technology reality must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled i didn't find how much i found out later that when i thought i was doing something independently i was being worked operated by somebody else who wanted to get something done without involving himself and so forth so those guys are clever you know i think i'm running around on my own hook getting a clue here and a clue there but those clues were just little taps to make me run in the right direction i was being had to a certain extent on the other hand i enjoyed it then it was fun to see what that crazy place is like ralph discovered that there was a uh museum exhibit associated with the silk road which had a lot of tuvan artifacts and things in it which was at present in sweden so ralph's idea there was that he would go to sweden acting as if he could get that exhibit transferred to the united states and then when it was transferred to the united states we would be the representative in the united states to make contact to look at sites where the things came from to take pictures that would work in the exhibit to do various things associated with we become museum people that had to go there in order to make the exhibit work ralph went to several museums with details of the silk road exhibition finally he and feynman met the curator of the los angeles county museum during the conversation in which ralph was explaining all these costs he finally said i think maybe we'll do this but what is your finder's fee and ralph said there is no finder's fee which is well that's kind of incredible why are you doing this he says because we want to arrange some way that we can get the tuva and that's our finest fee and that was the way that we first got a real chance to go to tour by moving the earth you know by getting an exhibit to be transferred to america by and so on well the russians laughed because two-thirds of their protocol were various gimmicks for getting russians to come here there were all kinds of people 17 different people were coming from russia for this exhibit so they understood this trick see they would get to see the mysterious disneyland the first ones to come were high in the system they were the curator and professor pizza andreika pizza we took them around and introduced them to some of our hippie-like people who have parrots and make music and enjoy life and have a funny view and he just utterly delighted with all this and he said you should come to tuba and i'm going to guarantee it i think that he understands what i understand but what he likes and what i like the same you don't want to be treated as anybody special just a regular guy he's just a russian that's visiting and these guys all shake hands with him is not the academy of science vice president deputy in charge you know none of that nobody said it damn worried about that and he was happy so i hope that the trip he's arranging for us will turn out that way if it'll turn out at all which is still a question three days later feynman went into hospital he died on monday the 15th of february two days after his death a letter arrived from moscow dear professor feinman i have the great pleasure to invite you your wife and four of your colleagues to visit the soviet union i was informed by professor kapitzer that you would like to visit tuva and get acquainted of its sightseeings we consider the most favorable time for such a trip to be the period of may and june 1988. your trip will take three to four weeks kindly note that the academy of sciences will cover your expenses your sincerely vice president velikov [Music] let me show you something here i'm not usually good at keeping secrets but this one i kept i was going to break these out at the monument when we finally reached our goal things like this t-shirt tuva with a map stuff and another one you know how you have i love new york i love california this one says kizzle love eye and then we're going to have souvenir hats here now tuva center of asia and everything but the chief never knew about it and now i regret i didn't tell so anyway takes the edge off the fun can i ask you ralph i mean i'll try anyway um what's going to happen now i mean to the tuva project it's hard to tell i i don't know what my feelings are going to be in a few months from now or whatever it's been a consuming kind of a thing but on the other hand certain factors are working their way into this now things like well tax time is coming up and we've got to think about can we afford a trip like this and i never thought of things like that before it financial considerations never worked into the equation before but now i'm starting to think of that and i think that must indicate that i'm not as set on it because i realize it was the adventure with my friend that this was all about well getting a little philosophical and serious okay let's go back to what we're doing one day we look at a map and it's capitalist k-y-z-y-l we've decided it would be fun to go there because it's so obscure cute it's a game it's not serious it doesn't involve some deep philosophical point of view about authorities or anything it's just fun of having an adventure to try to go to a land that we never heard of that we knew was an independent country once it's no longer an independent country find out what it's like and discover as we went along and nobody went there for a long time and it's isolated made it more interesting right you know many explorers like to go to places that are unusual and uh it's only for the fun of it and i don't go for this philosophical interpretation of our deeper understanding of what we're doing we have any deep understanding of what we're doing if we try to understand what we're doing we got it foreign juice juice juice juice juice [Music] dude [Music] [Music] hey you

Channel: Christopher Sykes

Views: 104,002

Keywords: feynman, genius, physics, science, ralph leighton, adventure, curiosity, soviet union, russia, asia, mongolia, tuva, tannu tuva, silk road, challenger, caltech, bbc, sykes, documentary, last journey, death, kongar, kongar ol ondar, throat music, throat singing, nasa, pasadena, stamps, postage stamps, romance, pbs, nova, horizon, fun to imagine, the pleasure of finding things out, short wave, geography, explore, discovery, birthday, centenary

Id: Qeauwu2uIwM

Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2018