(Remember my attitude to culture: This kind of thing would have driven me crazy if it were in my university!)
She started looking for a professor to lecture on the subject, and couldn’t find anybody at UCLA who was quite an expert. She telephoned various places and still couldn’t find anybody.
Then she remembered Professor Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, the great expert on Babylonian mathematics [2]. She telephoned him in Rhode Island and asked if he knew someone on the West Coast who could lecture on Mayan mathematics and astronomy.
“Yes,” he said. “I do. He’s not a professional anthropologist or a historian; he’s an amateur. But he certainly knows a lot about it. His name is Richard Feynman.”
She nearly died! She’s trying to bring some culture to the physicists, and the only way to do it is to get a physicist!
The only reason I knew anything about Mayan mathematics was that I was getting exhausted on my honeymoon in Mexico with my second wife, Mary Lou. She was greatly interested in •art history, particularly that of Mexico. So we went to Mexico for our honeymoon and we climbed up pyramids and down pyramids; she had me following her all over the place. She showed me many interesting things, such as certain relationships in the designs of various figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going up and down in hot and steamy jungles, I was exhausted.
In some little Guatemalan town in the middle of nowhere we went into a museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols, pictures, and bars and dots. It was a copy (made by a man named Villacorta) of the Dresden Codex, an original book made by the Mayans found in a museum in Dresden. I knew the bars and dots were numbers. My father had taken me to the New York World’s Fair when I was a little kid, and there they had reconstructed a Mayan temple. I remembered him telling me how the Mayans had invented the zero and had done many interesting things.
The museum had copies of the codex for sale, so I bought one. On each page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and partial translation in Spanish.
I love puzzles and codes, so when I saw the bars and dots, I thought, “I’m gonna have some fun!” I covered up the Spanish with a piece of yellow paper and began playing this game of deciphering the Mayan bars and dots, sitting in the hotel room, while my wife climbed up and down the pyramids all day.
I quickly figured out that a bar was equal to five dots, what the symbol for zero was, and so on. It took me a little longer to figure out that the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, but they carried at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). I also worked out all kinds of things about various faces: they had surely meant certain days and weeks.
After we got back home I continued to work on it. Altogether, it’s a lot of fun to try to decipher something like that, because when you start out you don’t know anything—you have no clue to go by. But then you notice certain numbers that appear often, and add up to other numbers, and so on.
There was one place in the codex where the number 584 was very prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. Another prominent number was 2920, or 584 x 5 (also 365 x 8). There was a table of multiples of 2920 up to 13 x 2920, then there were multiples of 13 x 2920 for a while, and then—funnynumbers! They were errors, as far as I could tell. Only many years later did I figure out what they were.
Because figures denoting days were associated with this 584 which was divided up so peculiarly, I figured if it wasn’t some mythical period of some sort, it might be something astronomical, Finally I went down to the astronomy library and looked it up, and found that 583.92 days is the period of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became apparent: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. It’s a morning star, then it can’t be seen (it’s on the far side of the sun); then it’s an evening star, and finally it disappears again (it’s between the earth and the sun). The 90 and the 8 are different because Venus moves more slowly through the sky when it is on the far side of the sun compared to when it passes between the earth and the sun. The difference between the 236 and the 250 might indicate a difference between the eastern and western horizons in Maya land.
I discovered another table nearby that had periods of 11,959 days. This turned out to be a table for predicting lunar eclipses. Still another table had multiples of 91 in descending order. I never did figure that one out (nor has anyone else).
When I had worked out as much as I could, I finally decided to look at the Spanish commentary to see how much I was able to figure out. It was complete nonsense. This symbol was Saturn, this symbol was a god—it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense. So I didn’t have to have covered the commentary; I wouldn’t have learned anything from it anyway.
After that I began to read a lot about the Mayans, and found that the great man in this business was Eric Thompson, some of whose books I now have.
When Nina Byers called me up I realized that I had lost my copy of the Dresden Codex. (I had lent it to Mrs. H. P Robertson, who had found a Mayan codex in an old trunk of an antique dealer in Paris. She had brought it back to Pasadena for me to look at—I still remember driving home with it on the front seat of my car, thinking, “I’ve gotta be careful driving: I’ve got the new codex”—but as soon as I looked at it carefully, I could see immediately that it was a complete fake. After a little bit of work I could find where each picture in the new codex had come from in the Dresden Codex. So I lent her my book to show her, and I eventually forgot she had it.) So the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta’s rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me.
I did all the calculations all over again, and in fact I got a little bit further than I did before: I figured out that those “funny numbers” which I thought before were errors were really integer multiples of something closer to the correct period (583.923)—the Mayans had realized that 584 wasn’t exactly right! [3]
After the colloquium at UCLA Professor Byers presented me with some beautiful color reproductions of the Dresden Codex. A few months later Caltech wanted me to give the same lecture to the public in Pasadena. Robert Rowan, a real estate man, lent me some very valuable stone carvings of Mayan gods and ceramic figures for the Caltech lecture, It was probably highly illegal to take something like that out of Mexico, and they were so valuable that we hired security guards to protect them.
A few days before the Caltech lecture there was a big splurge in the New York Times, which reported that a new codex had been discovered. There were only three codices (two of which are hard to get anything out of) known to exist at the time-hundreds of thousands had been burned by Spanish priests as “works of the Devil.” My cousin was working for the AP, so she got me a glossy picture copy of what the New York Times had published and I made a slide of it to include in my talk.
This new codex was a fake. In my lecture I pointed out that the numbers were in the style of the Madrid codex, but were 236, 90, 250, 8—rather a coincidence! Out of the hundred thousand books originally made we get another fragment, and it has the same thing on it as the other fragments! It was obviously, again, one of these put-together things which had nothing original in it.
These people who copy things never have the courage to make up something really different. If you find something that is really new, it’s got to have something different. A real hoax would be to take something like the period of Mars, invent a mythology to go with it, and then draw pictures associated with this mythology with numbers appropriate to Mars—not in an obvious fashion; rather, have tables of multiples of the period with some mysterious “errors,” and so on. The numbers should have to be worked out a little bit. Then people would say, “Geez! This has to do with Mars!” In addition, there should be a number of things in it that are not understandable, and are not exactly like what has been seen before. That would make a good fake.
I got a big kick out of giving my talk on “Deciphering Mayan Hieroglyphics.” There I was, being something I’m not, again. People filed into the auditorium past these glass cases, admiring the color reproductions of the Dresden Codex and the authentic Mayan artifacts watched over by an armed guard in uniform; they heard a two-hour lecture on Mayan mathematics and astronomy from an amateur expert in the field (who even told them how to spot a fake codex), and then they went out, admiring the cases again. Murray Gell-Mann countered in the following weeks by giving a beautiful set of six lectures concerning the linguistic relations of all the languages of the world.
Found Out in Paris
Altered States
She started looking for a professor to lecture on the subject, and couldn’t find anybody at UCLA who was quite an expert. She telephoned various places and still couldn’t find anybody.
Then she remembered Professor Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, the great expert on Babylonian mathematics [2]. She telephoned him in Rhode Island and asked if he knew someone on the West Coast who could lecture on Mayan mathematics and astronomy.
“Yes,” he said. “I do. He’s not a professional anthropologist or a historian; he’s an amateur. But he certainly knows a lot about it. His name is Richard Feynman.”
She nearly died! She’s trying to bring some culture to the physicists, and the only way to do it is to get a physicist!
The only reason I knew anything about Mayan mathematics was that I was getting exhausted on my honeymoon in Mexico with my second wife, Mary Lou. She was greatly interested in •art history, particularly that of Mexico. So we went to Mexico for our honeymoon and we climbed up pyramids and down pyramids; she had me following her all over the place. She showed me many interesting things, such as certain relationships in the designs of various figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going up and down in hot and steamy jungles, I was exhausted.
In some little Guatemalan town in the middle of nowhere we went into a museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols, pictures, and bars and dots. It was a copy (made by a man named Villacorta) of the Dresden Codex, an original book made by the Mayans found in a museum in Dresden. I knew the bars and dots were numbers. My father had taken me to the New York World’s Fair when I was a little kid, and there they had reconstructed a Mayan temple. I remembered him telling me how the Mayans had invented the zero and had done many interesting things.
The museum had copies of the codex for sale, so I bought one. On each page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and partial translation in Spanish.
I love puzzles and codes, so when I saw the bars and dots, I thought, “I’m gonna have some fun!” I covered up the Spanish with a piece of yellow paper and began playing this game of deciphering the Mayan bars and dots, sitting in the hotel room, while my wife climbed up and down the pyramids all day.
I quickly figured out that a bar was equal to five dots, what the symbol for zero was, and so on. It took me a little longer to figure out that the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, but they carried at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). I also worked out all kinds of things about various faces: they had surely meant certain days and weeks.
After we got back home I continued to work on it. Altogether, it’s a lot of fun to try to decipher something like that, because when you start out you don’t know anything—you have no clue to go by. But then you notice certain numbers that appear often, and add up to other numbers, and so on.
There was one place in the codex where the number 584 was very prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. Another prominent number was 2920, or 584 x 5 (also 365 x 8). There was a table of multiples of 2920 up to 13 x 2920, then there were multiples of 13 x 2920 for a while, and then—funnynumbers! They were errors, as far as I could tell. Only many years later did I figure out what they were.
Because figures denoting days were associated with this 584 which was divided up so peculiarly, I figured if it wasn’t some mythical period of some sort, it might be something astronomical, Finally I went down to the astronomy library and looked it up, and found that 583.92 days is the period of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became apparent: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. It’s a morning star, then it can’t be seen (it’s on the far side of the sun); then it’s an evening star, and finally it disappears again (it’s between the earth and the sun). The 90 and the 8 are different because Venus moves more slowly through the sky when it is on the far side of the sun compared to when it passes between the earth and the sun. The difference between the 236 and the 250 might indicate a difference between the eastern and western horizons in Maya land.
I discovered another table nearby that had periods of 11,959 days. This turned out to be a table for predicting lunar eclipses. Still another table had multiples of 91 in descending order. I never did figure that one out (nor has anyone else).
When I had worked out as much as I could, I finally decided to look at the Spanish commentary to see how much I was able to figure out. It was complete nonsense. This symbol was Saturn, this symbol was a god—it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense. So I didn’t have to have covered the commentary; I wouldn’t have learned anything from it anyway.
After that I began to read a lot about the Mayans, and found that the great man in this business was Eric Thompson, some of whose books I now have.
When Nina Byers called me up I realized that I had lost my copy of the Dresden Codex. (I had lent it to Mrs. H. P Robertson, who had found a Mayan codex in an old trunk of an antique dealer in Paris. She had brought it back to Pasadena for me to look at—I still remember driving home with it on the front seat of my car, thinking, “I’ve gotta be careful driving: I’ve got the new codex”—but as soon as I looked at it carefully, I could see immediately that it was a complete fake. After a little bit of work I could find where each picture in the new codex had come from in the Dresden Codex. So I lent her my book to show her, and I eventually forgot she had it.) So the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta’s rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me.
I did all the calculations all over again, and in fact I got a little bit further than I did before: I figured out that those “funny numbers” which I thought before were errors were really integer multiples of something closer to the correct period (583.923)—the Mayans had realized that 584 wasn’t exactly right! [3]
After the colloquium at UCLA Professor Byers presented me with some beautiful color reproductions of the Dresden Codex. A few months later Caltech wanted me to give the same lecture to the public in Pasadena. Robert Rowan, a real estate man, lent me some very valuable stone carvings of Mayan gods and ceramic figures for the Caltech lecture, It was probably highly illegal to take something like that out of Mexico, and they were so valuable that we hired security guards to protect them.
A few days before the Caltech lecture there was a big splurge in the New York Times, which reported that a new codex had been discovered. There were only three codices (two of which are hard to get anything out of) known to exist at the time-hundreds of thousands had been burned by Spanish priests as “works of the Devil.” My cousin was working for the AP, so she got me a glossy picture copy of what the New York Times had published and I made a slide of it to include in my talk.
This new codex was a fake. In my lecture I pointed out that the numbers were in the style of the Madrid codex, but were 236, 90, 250, 8—rather a coincidence! Out of the hundred thousand books originally made we get another fragment, and it has the same thing on it as the other fragments! It was obviously, again, one of these put-together things which had nothing original in it.
These people who copy things never have the courage to make up something really different. If you find something that is really new, it’s got to have something different. A real hoax would be to take something like the period of Mars, invent a mythology to go with it, and then draw pictures associated with this mythology with numbers appropriate to Mars—not in an obvious fashion; rather, have tables of multiples of the period with some mysterious “errors,” and so on. The numbers should have to be worked out a little bit. Then people would say, “Geez! This has to do with Mars!” In addition, there should be a number of things in it that are not understandable, and are not exactly like what has been seen before. That would make a good fake.
I got a big kick out of giving my talk on “Deciphering Mayan Hieroglyphics.” There I was, being something I’m not, again. People filed into the auditorium past these glass cases, admiring the color reproductions of the Dresden Codex and the authentic Mayan artifacts watched over by an armed guard in uniform; they heard a two-hour lecture on Mayan mathematics and astronomy from an amateur expert in the field (who even told them how to spot a fake codex), and then they went out, admiring the cases again. Murray Gell-Mann countered in the following weeks by giving a beautiful set of six lectures concerning the linguistic relations of all the languages of the world.
Found Out in Paris
I gave a series of lectures in physics that the Addison-Wesley Company made into a book, and one time at lunch we were discussing what the cover of the book should look like, I thought that since the lectures were a combination of the real world and mathematics, it would be a good idea to have a picture of a drum, and on top of it some mathematical diagrams—circles and lines for the nodes of the oscillating drumheads, which were discussed in the book.
The book came out with a plain, red cover, but for some reason, in the preface, there’s a picture of me playing a drum. I think they put it in there to satisfy this idea they got that “the author wants a drum somewhere.” Anyway, everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums is in the preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn’t have any diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It’s true that I like drumming, but that’s another story.)
At Los Alamos things were pretty tense from all the work, and there wasn’t any way to amuse yourself: there weren’t any movies, or anything like that. But I discovered some drums that the boys’ school, which had been there previously, had collected: Los Alamos was in the middle of New Mexico, where there are lots of Indian villages. So I amused myself—sometimes alone, sometimes with another guy—just making noise, playing on these drums. I didn’t know any particular rhythm, but the rhythms of the Indians were rather simple, the drums were good, and I had fun.
Sometimes I would take the drums with me into the woods at some distance, so I wouldn’t disturb anybody, and would beat them with a stick, and sing. I remember one night walking around a tree, looking at the moon, and beating the drum, making believe I was an Indian.
One day a guy came up to me and said, “Around Thanksgiving you weren’t out in the woods beating a drum, were you?”
“Yes, I was,” I said.
“Oh! Then my wife was right!” Then he told me this story:
One night he heard some drum music in the distance, and went upstairs to the other guy in the duplex house that they lived in, and the other guy heard it too. Remember, all these guys were from the East. They didn’t know anything about Indians, and they were very interested: the Indians must have been having some kind of ceremony, or something exciting, and the two men decided to go out to see what it was.
As they walked along, the music got louder as they came nearer, and they began to get nervous. They realized that the Indians probably had scouts out watching so that nobody would disturb their ceremony. So they got down on their bellies and crawled along the trail until the sound was just over the next hill, apparently. They crawled up over the hill and discovered to their surprise that it was only one Indian, doing the ceremony all by himself—dancing around a tree, beating the drum with a stick, chanting. The two guys backed away from him slowly, because they didn’t want to disturb him: He was probably setting up some kind of spell, or something.
They told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, “Oh, it must have been Feynman—he likes to beat drums.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” the men said. “Even Feynman wouldn’t be that crazy!”
So the next week they set about trying to figure out who the Indian was. There were Indians from the nearby reservation working at Los Alamos, so they asked one Indian, who was a technician in the technical area, who it could be. The Indian asked around, but none of the other Indians knew who it might be, except there was one Indian whom nobody could talk to. He was an Indian who knew his race: He had two big braids down his back and held his head high; whenever he walked anywhere he walked with dignity, alone; and nobody could talk to him. You would be afraid to go up to him and ask him anything; he had too much dignity. He was a furnace man. So nobody ever had the nerve to ask this Indian, and they decided it must have been him. (I was pleased to find that they had discovered such a typical Indian, such a wonderful Indian, that I might have been. It was quite an honor to be mistaken for this man.)
So the fella who’d been talking to me was just checking at the last minute—husbands always like to prove their wives wrong—and he found out, as husbands often do, that his wife was quite right.
I got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had parties. I didn’t know what I was doing; I just made rhythms—and I got a reputation: Everybody at Los Alamos knew I liked to play drums.
When the war was over, and we were going back to “civilization,” the people there at Los Alamos teased me that I wouldn’t be able to play drums any more because they made too much noise. And since I was trying to become a dignified professor in Ithaca, I sold the drum that I had bought sometime during my stay at Los Alamos.
The following summer I went back out to New Mexico to work on some report, and when I saw the drums again, I couldn’t stand it. I bought myself another drum, and thought, “I’ll just bring it back with me this time so I can look at it.”
That year at Cornell I had a small apartment inside a bigger house. I had the drum in there, just to look at, but one day I couldn’t quite resist: I said, “Well, I’ll just be very quiet …”
I sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my fingers a little bit: bup, bup, bup, buddle bup. Then a little bit louder—after all, it was tempting me! I got a little bit louder and BOOM!—the telephone rang.
“Hello?”
“This is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?”
“Yes; I’m sor—”
“It sounds so good. I wonder if I could come down and listen to it more directly?”
So from that time on the landlady would always come down when I’d start to drum. That was freedom, all right. I had a very good time from then on, beating the drums.
Around that time I met a lady from the Belgian Congo who gave me some ethnological records. In those days, records like that were rare, with drum music from the Watusi and other tribes of Africa. I really admired the Watusi drummers very, very much, and I used to try to imitate them—not very accurately, but just to sound something like them—and I developed a larger number of rhythms as a result of that.
One time I was in the recreation hall, late at night, when there weren’t many people, and I picked up a wastebasket and started to beat the back end of it. Some guy from way downstairs came running all the way up and said, “Hey! You play drums!” It turned out he really knew how to play drums, and he taught me how to play bongos.
There was some guy in the music department who had a collection of African music, and I’d come to his house and play drums. He’d make recordings of me, and then at his parties, he had a game that he called “Africa or Ithaca?” in which he’d play some recordings of drum music, and the idea was to guess whether what you were hearing was manufactured in the continent of Africa, or locally. So I must have been fairly good at imitating African music by that time.
When I came to Caltech, I used to go down to the Sunset Strip a lot. One time there was a group of drummers led by a big fella from Nigeria called Ukonu, playing this wonderful drum music—just percussion—at one of the nightclubs. The second-in-command, who was especially nice to me, invited me to come up on the stage with them and play a little. So I got up there with the other guys and played along with them on the drums for a little while.
I asked the second guy if Ukonu ever gave lessons, and he said yes. So I used to go down to Ukonu’s place, near Century Boulevard (where the Watts riots later occurred) to get lessons in drumming. The lessons weren’t very efficient: he would stall around, talk to other people, and be interrupted by all kinds of things. But when they worked they were very exciting, and I learned a lot from him.
At dances near Ukonu’s place, there would be only a few whites, but it was much more relaxed than it is today. One time they had a drumming contest, and I didn’t do very well: They said my drumming was “too intellectual”; theirs was much more pulsing.
One day when I was at Caltech I got a very serious telephone call.
“Hello?”
“This is Mr. Trowbridge, Mahster of the Polytechnic School.” The Polytechnic School was a small, private school which was across the street diagonally from Caltech. Mr. Trowbridge continued in a very formal voice: “I have a friend of yours here, who would like to speak to you.”
“OK.”
“Hello, Dick!” It was Ukonu! It turned out the Master of the Polytechnic School was not as formal as he was making himself out to be, and had a great sense of humor. Ukonu was visiting the school to play for the kids, so he invited me to come over and be on the stage with him, and play along. So we played for the kids together: I played bongos (which I had in my office) against his big tumba drum.
Ukonu had a regular thing: He went to various schools and talked about the African drums and what they meant, and told about the music. He had a terrific personality and a grand smile; he was a very, very nice man. He was just sensational on the drums—he had records out—and was here studying medicine. He went back to Nigeria at the beginning of the war there—or before the war—and I don’t know what happened to him.
After Ukonu left I didn’t do very much drumming, except at parties once in a while, entertaining a little bit. One time I was at a dinner party at the Leightons’ house, and Bob’s son Ralph and a friend asked me if I wanted to drum. Thinking that they were asking me to do a solo, I said no. But then they started drumming on some little wooden tables, and I couldn’t resist: I grabbed a table too, and the three of us played on these little wooden tables, which made lots of interesting sounds.
Ralph and his friend Tom Rutishauser liked playing drums, and we began meeting every week to just ad lib, develop rhythms and work stuff out. These two guys were real musicians: Ralph played piano, and Torn played the cello. All I had done was rhythms, and I didn’t know anything about music, which, as far as I could tell, was just drumming with notes. But we worked out a lot of good rhythms and played a few times at some of the schools to entertain the kids. We also played rhythms for a dance class at a local college—something I learned was fun to do when I was working at Brookhaven for a while—and called ourselves The Three Quarks, so you can figure out when that was.
One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. The band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment—you can’t screw it up) I really got hot.
After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that the band leader said, “Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way, that big shot this party was supposed to be for—you know, he never came down here; I never did see who it was!”
Anyhow, at Caltech there’s a group that puts on plays. Some of the actors are Caltech students; others are from the outside. When there’s a small part, such as a policeman who’s supposed to arrest somebody, they get one of the professors to do it. It’s always a big joke-the professor comes on and arrests somebody, and goes off again.
A few years ago the group was doing Guys and Dolls, and there was a scene where the main guy takes the girl to Havana, and they’re in a nightclub. The director thought it would be a good idea to have the bongo player on the stage in the nightclub be me.
I went to the first rehearsal, and the lady directing the show pointed to the orchestra conductor and said, “Jack will show you the music.”
Well, that petrified me. I don’t know how to read music; I thought all I had to do was get up there on the stage and make some noise.
Jack was sitting by the piano, and he pointed to the music and said, “OK, you start here, you see, and you do this. Then I play plonk, plonk, plonk ”—he played a few notes on the piano. He turned the page. “Then you play this, and now we both pause for a speech, you see, here”—and he turned some more pages and said, “Finally, you play this.”
He showed me this “music” that was written in some kind of crazy pattern of little x’s in the bars and lines. He kept telling me all this stuff, thinking I was a musician, and it was completely impossible for me to remember any of it.
Fortunately, I got ill the next day, and couldn’t come to the next rehearsal, I asked my friend Ralph to go for me, and since he’s a musician, he should know what it’s all about. Ralph came back and said, “It’s not so bad. First, at the very beginning, you have to do something exactly right because you’re starting the rhythm out for the rest of the orchestra, which will mesh in with it. But after the orchestra comes in, it’s a matter of ad-libbing, and there will be times when we have to pause for speeches, but I think we’ll be able to figure that out from the cues the orchestra conductor gives.”
In the meantime I had gotten the director to accept Ralph too, so the two of us would be on the stage. He’d play the tumba and I’d play the bongos—so that made it a helluva lot easier for me.
So Ralph showed me what the rhythm was. It must have been only about twenty or thirty beats, but it had to be just so. I’d never had to play anything just so, and it was very hard for me to get it right. Ralph would patiently explain, “left hand, and right hand, and two left hands, then right.
I worked very hard, and finally, very slowly, I began to get the rhythm just right. It took me a helluva long time-many days—to get it.
A week later we went to the rehearsal and found there was a new drummer there-the regular drummer had quit the band to do something else—and we introduced ourselves to him:
“Hi. We’re the guys who are going to be on stage for the Havana scene.”
“Oh, hi. Let me find the scene here …” and he turned to the page where our scene was, took out his drumming stick, and said, “Oh, you start off the scene with …” and with his stick against the side of his drum he goes bing, bong, ban g-a-bang, bing-a-bing, bang, bang at full speed, while he was looking at the music! What a shock that was to me. I had worked for four days to try to get that damn rhythm, and he could just patter it right out!
Anyway, after practicing again and again I finally got it straight and played it in the show. It was pretty successful: Everybody was amused to see the professor on stage playing the bongos, and the music wasn’t so bad; but that part at the beginning, that had to be the same: that was hard.
In the Havana nightclub scene some of the students had to do some sort of dance that had to be choreographed. So the director had gotten the wife of one of the guys at Caltech, who was a choreographer working at that time for Universal Studios, to teach the boys how to dance. She liked our drumming, and when the shows were over, she asked us if we would like to drum in San Francisco for a ballet.
“WHAT?”
Yes. She was moving to San Francisco, and was choreographing a ballet for a small ballet school there. She had the idea of creating a ballet in which the music was nothing but percussion. She wanted Ralph and me to come over to her house before she moved and play the different rhythms that we knew, and from those she would make up a story that went with the rhythms.
Ralph had some misgivings, but I encouraged him to go along with this adventure. I did insist, however, that she not tell anybody there that I was a professor of physics, Nobel Prize-winner, or any other baloney. I didn’t want to do the drumming if I was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said, If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it’s not so much that he does it well, as that he does it at all. I didn’t want to do it if I was a physics professor doing it at all; we were just some musicians she had found in Los Angeles, who were going to come up and play this drum music that they had composed.
So we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked out. She took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this story cooked up in her mind and said, “OK, I want fifty-two repetitions of this; forty bars of that; whatever of this, that, this, that …”
We went home, and the next night we made a tape at Ralph’s house. We played all the rhythms for a few minutes, and then Ralph made some cuts and splices with his tape recorder to get the various lengths right. She took a copy of our tape with her when she moved, and began training the dancers with it in San Francisco.
Meanwhile we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty-two cycles of this, forty cycles of that, and so on. What we had done spontaneously (and spliced) earlier, we now had to learn exactly. We had to imitate our own damn tape!
The big problem was counting. I thought Ralph would know how to do that because he’s a musician, but we both discovered something funny. The “playing department” in our minds was also the “talking department” for counting—we couldn’t play and count at the same time!
When we got to our first rehearsal in San Francisco, we discovered that by watching the dancers we didn’t have to count because the dancers went through certain motions.
There were a number of things that happened to us because we were supposed to be professional musicians and I wasn’t. For example, one of the scenes was about a beggar woman who sifts through the sand on a Caribbean beach where the society ladies, who had come out at the beginning of the ballet, had been. The music that the choreographer had used to create this scene was made on a special drum that Ralph and his father had made rather amateurishly some years before, and out of which we had never had much luck in getting a good tone. But we discovered that if we sat opposite each other on chairs and put this “crazy drum” between us on our knees, with one guy beating bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda rapidly with his two fingers, constantly, the other fella could push on the drum in different places with his two hands and change the pitch. Now it would go booda— booda— booda— bidda— beeda— beeda— beeda— bidda— booda-booda-booda-badda-bidda-bidda-bidda-badda, creating a lot of interesting sounds.
Well, the dancer who played the beggar woman wanted the rises and falls to coincide with her dance (our tape had been made arbitrarily for this scene), so she proceeded to explain to us what she was going to do: “First, I do four of these movements this way; then I bend down and sift through the sand this way for eight counts; then I stand and turn this way.” I knew damn well I couldn’t keep track of this, so I interrupted her:
“Just go ahead and do the dance, and I’ll play along.”
“But don’t you want to know how the dance goes? You see, after I’ve finished the second sifting part, I go for eight counts over this way.” It was no use; I couldn’t remember anything, and I wanted to interrupt her again, but then there was this problem: I would look like I was not a real musician!
Well, Ralph covered for me very smoothly by explaining, “Mr. Feynman has a special technique for this type of situation: He prefers to develop the dynamics directly and intuitively, as he sees you dance. Let’s try it once that way, and if you’re not satisfied, we can correct it.”
Well, she was a first-rate dancer, and you could anticipate what she was going to do. If she was going to dig into the sand, she would get ready to go down into the sand; every motion was smooth and expected, so it was rather easy to make the bzzzzs and bshshs and boodas and biddas with my hands quite appropriate to what she was doing, and she was very satisfied with it. So we got past that moment where we might have had our cover blown.
The ballet was kind of a success. Although there weren’t many people in the audience, the people who came to see the performances liked it very much.
Before we went to San Francisco for the rehearsals and the performances, we weren’t sure of the whole idea. I mean, we thought the choreographer was insane: first, the ballet has only percussion; second, that we’re good enough to make music for a ballet and get paid for it was surely crazy! For me, who had never had any “culture,” to end up as a professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it were.
We didn’t think that she’d be able to find ballet dancers who would be willing to dance to our drum music. (As a matter of fact, there was one prima donna from Brazil, the wife of the Portuguese consul, who decided it was beneath her to dance to it.) But the other dancers seemed to like it very much, and my heart felt good when we played for them for the first time in rehearsal. The delight they felt when they heard how our rhythms really sounded (they had until then been using our tape played on a small cassette recorder) was genuine, and I had much more confidence when I saw how they reacted to our actual playing. And from the comments of the people who had come to the performances, we realized that we were a success.
The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African phrases to sing at the beginning (GAwa baNYUma GAwa WO, or something like that), and I practiced them until I had them just so.
Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn’t figure out how to make elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of papier mвchй were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance in front of them.
We didn’t offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home, listening to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a sudden I was hypnotized.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, “Tusks!” Behind him, on the floor, were these enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!
He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great relief of the dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner Erhard.
The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a high-quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers there in France to do a small section of the ballet—that’s how she entered the contest.
She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only two left—a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America, with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a ballet which had nothing but our drum music.
She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn’t a popularity contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the judges afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.
“Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle enough. Controlled crescendoes were missing..
And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.
The book came out with a plain, red cover, but for some reason, in the preface, there’s a picture of me playing a drum. I think they put it in there to satisfy this idea they got that “the author wants a drum somewhere.” Anyway, everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums is in the preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn’t have any diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It’s true that I like drumming, but that’s another story.)
At Los Alamos things were pretty tense from all the work, and there wasn’t any way to amuse yourself: there weren’t any movies, or anything like that. But I discovered some drums that the boys’ school, which had been there previously, had collected: Los Alamos was in the middle of New Mexico, where there are lots of Indian villages. So I amused myself—sometimes alone, sometimes with another guy—just making noise, playing on these drums. I didn’t know any particular rhythm, but the rhythms of the Indians were rather simple, the drums were good, and I had fun.
Sometimes I would take the drums with me into the woods at some distance, so I wouldn’t disturb anybody, and would beat them with a stick, and sing. I remember one night walking around a tree, looking at the moon, and beating the drum, making believe I was an Indian.
One day a guy came up to me and said, “Around Thanksgiving you weren’t out in the woods beating a drum, were you?”
“Yes, I was,” I said.
“Oh! Then my wife was right!” Then he told me this story:
One night he heard some drum music in the distance, and went upstairs to the other guy in the duplex house that they lived in, and the other guy heard it too. Remember, all these guys were from the East. They didn’t know anything about Indians, and they were very interested: the Indians must have been having some kind of ceremony, or something exciting, and the two men decided to go out to see what it was.
As they walked along, the music got louder as they came nearer, and they began to get nervous. They realized that the Indians probably had scouts out watching so that nobody would disturb their ceremony. So they got down on their bellies and crawled along the trail until the sound was just over the next hill, apparently. They crawled up over the hill and discovered to their surprise that it was only one Indian, doing the ceremony all by himself—dancing around a tree, beating the drum with a stick, chanting. The two guys backed away from him slowly, because they didn’t want to disturb him: He was probably setting up some kind of spell, or something.
They told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, “Oh, it must have been Feynman—he likes to beat drums.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” the men said. “Even Feynman wouldn’t be that crazy!”
So the next week they set about trying to figure out who the Indian was. There were Indians from the nearby reservation working at Los Alamos, so they asked one Indian, who was a technician in the technical area, who it could be. The Indian asked around, but none of the other Indians knew who it might be, except there was one Indian whom nobody could talk to. He was an Indian who knew his race: He had two big braids down his back and held his head high; whenever he walked anywhere he walked with dignity, alone; and nobody could talk to him. You would be afraid to go up to him and ask him anything; he had too much dignity. He was a furnace man. So nobody ever had the nerve to ask this Indian, and they decided it must have been him. (I was pleased to find that they had discovered such a typical Indian, such a wonderful Indian, that I might have been. It was quite an honor to be mistaken for this man.)
So the fella who’d been talking to me was just checking at the last minute—husbands always like to prove their wives wrong—and he found out, as husbands often do, that his wife was quite right.
I got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had parties. I didn’t know what I was doing; I just made rhythms—and I got a reputation: Everybody at Los Alamos knew I liked to play drums.
When the war was over, and we were going back to “civilization,” the people there at Los Alamos teased me that I wouldn’t be able to play drums any more because they made too much noise. And since I was trying to become a dignified professor in Ithaca, I sold the drum that I had bought sometime during my stay at Los Alamos.
The following summer I went back out to New Mexico to work on some report, and when I saw the drums again, I couldn’t stand it. I bought myself another drum, and thought, “I’ll just bring it back with me this time so I can look at it.”
That year at Cornell I had a small apartment inside a bigger house. I had the drum in there, just to look at, but one day I couldn’t quite resist: I said, “Well, I’ll just be very quiet …”
I sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my fingers a little bit: bup, bup, bup, buddle bup. Then a little bit louder—after all, it was tempting me! I got a little bit louder and BOOM!—the telephone rang.
“Hello?”
“This is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?”
“Yes; I’m sor—”
“It sounds so good. I wonder if I could come down and listen to it more directly?”
So from that time on the landlady would always come down when I’d start to drum. That was freedom, all right. I had a very good time from then on, beating the drums.
Around that time I met a lady from the Belgian Congo who gave me some ethnological records. In those days, records like that were rare, with drum music from the Watusi and other tribes of Africa. I really admired the Watusi drummers very, very much, and I used to try to imitate them—not very accurately, but just to sound something like them—and I developed a larger number of rhythms as a result of that.
One time I was in the recreation hall, late at night, when there weren’t many people, and I picked up a wastebasket and started to beat the back end of it. Some guy from way downstairs came running all the way up and said, “Hey! You play drums!” It turned out he really knew how to play drums, and he taught me how to play bongos.
There was some guy in the music department who had a collection of African music, and I’d come to his house and play drums. He’d make recordings of me, and then at his parties, he had a game that he called “Africa or Ithaca?” in which he’d play some recordings of drum music, and the idea was to guess whether what you were hearing was manufactured in the continent of Africa, or locally. So I must have been fairly good at imitating African music by that time.
When I came to Caltech, I used to go down to the Sunset Strip a lot. One time there was a group of drummers led by a big fella from Nigeria called Ukonu, playing this wonderful drum music—just percussion—at one of the nightclubs. The second-in-command, who was especially nice to me, invited me to come up on the stage with them and play a little. So I got up there with the other guys and played along with them on the drums for a little while.
I asked the second guy if Ukonu ever gave lessons, and he said yes. So I used to go down to Ukonu’s place, near Century Boulevard (where the Watts riots later occurred) to get lessons in drumming. The lessons weren’t very efficient: he would stall around, talk to other people, and be interrupted by all kinds of things. But when they worked they were very exciting, and I learned a lot from him.
At dances near Ukonu’s place, there would be only a few whites, but it was much more relaxed than it is today. One time they had a drumming contest, and I didn’t do very well: They said my drumming was “too intellectual”; theirs was much more pulsing.
One day when I was at Caltech I got a very serious telephone call.
“Hello?”
“This is Mr. Trowbridge, Mahster of the Polytechnic School.” The Polytechnic School was a small, private school which was across the street diagonally from Caltech. Mr. Trowbridge continued in a very formal voice: “I have a friend of yours here, who would like to speak to you.”
“OK.”
“Hello, Dick!” It was Ukonu! It turned out the Master of the Polytechnic School was not as formal as he was making himself out to be, and had a great sense of humor. Ukonu was visiting the school to play for the kids, so he invited me to come over and be on the stage with him, and play along. So we played for the kids together: I played bongos (which I had in my office) against his big tumba drum.
Ukonu had a regular thing: He went to various schools and talked about the African drums and what they meant, and told about the music. He had a terrific personality and a grand smile; he was a very, very nice man. He was just sensational on the drums—he had records out—and was here studying medicine. He went back to Nigeria at the beginning of the war there—or before the war—and I don’t know what happened to him.
After Ukonu left I didn’t do very much drumming, except at parties once in a while, entertaining a little bit. One time I was at a dinner party at the Leightons’ house, and Bob’s son Ralph and a friend asked me if I wanted to drum. Thinking that they were asking me to do a solo, I said no. But then they started drumming on some little wooden tables, and I couldn’t resist: I grabbed a table too, and the three of us played on these little wooden tables, which made lots of interesting sounds.
Ralph and his friend Tom Rutishauser liked playing drums, and we began meeting every week to just ad lib, develop rhythms and work stuff out. These two guys were real musicians: Ralph played piano, and Torn played the cello. All I had done was rhythms, and I didn’t know anything about music, which, as far as I could tell, was just drumming with notes. But we worked out a lot of good rhythms and played a few times at some of the schools to entertain the kids. We also played rhythms for a dance class at a local college—something I learned was fun to do when I was working at Brookhaven for a while—and called ourselves The Three Quarks, so you can figure out when that was.
One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. The band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment—you can’t screw it up) I really got hot.
After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that the band leader said, “Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way, that big shot this party was supposed to be for—you know, he never came down here; I never did see who it was!”
Anyhow, at Caltech there’s a group that puts on plays. Some of the actors are Caltech students; others are from the outside. When there’s a small part, such as a policeman who’s supposed to arrest somebody, they get one of the professors to do it. It’s always a big joke-the professor comes on and arrests somebody, and goes off again.
A few years ago the group was doing Guys and Dolls, and there was a scene where the main guy takes the girl to Havana, and they’re in a nightclub. The director thought it would be a good idea to have the bongo player on the stage in the nightclub be me.
I went to the first rehearsal, and the lady directing the show pointed to the orchestra conductor and said, “Jack will show you the music.”
Well, that petrified me. I don’t know how to read music; I thought all I had to do was get up there on the stage and make some noise.
Jack was sitting by the piano, and he pointed to the music and said, “OK, you start here, you see, and you do this. Then I play plonk, plonk, plonk ”—he played a few notes on the piano. He turned the page. “Then you play this, and now we both pause for a speech, you see, here”—and he turned some more pages and said, “Finally, you play this.”
He showed me this “music” that was written in some kind of crazy pattern of little x’s in the bars and lines. He kept telling me all this stuff, thinking I was a musician, and it was completely impossible for me to remember any of it.
Fortunately, I got ill the next day, and couldn’t come to the next rehearsal, I asked my friend Ralph to go for me, and since he’s a musician, he should know what it’s all about. Ralph came back and said, “It’s not so bad. First, at the very beginning, you have to do something exactly right because you’re starting the rhythm out for the rest of the orchestra, which will mesh in with it. But after the orchestra comes in, it’s a matter of ad-libbing, and there will be times when we have to pause for speeches, but I think we’ll be able to figure that out from the cues the orchestra conductor gives.”
In the meantime I had gotten the director to accept Ralph too, so the two of us would be on the stage. He’d play the tumba and I’d play the bongos—so that made it a helluva lot easier for me.
So Ralph showed me what the rhythm was. It must have been only about twenty or thirty beats, but it had to be just so. I’d never had to play anything just so, and it was very hard for me to get it right. Ralph would patiently explain, “left hand, and right hand, and two left hands, then right.
I worked very hard, and finally, very slowly, I began to get the rhythm just right. It took me a helluva long time-many days—to get it.
A week later we went to the rehearsal and found there was a new drummer there-the regular drummer had quit the band to do something else—and we introduced ourselves to him:
“Hi. We’re the guys who are going to be on stage for the Havana scene.”
“Oh, hi. Let me find the scene here …” and he turned to the page where our scene was, took out his drumming stick, and said, “Oh, you start off the scene with …” and with his stick against the side of his drum he goes bing, bong, ban g-a-bang, bing-a-bing, bang, bang at full speed, while he was looking at the music! What a shock that was to me. I had worked for four days to try to get that damn rhythm, and he could just patter it right out!
Anyway, after practicing again and again I finally got it straight and played it in the show. It was pretty successful: Everybody was amused to see the professor on stage playing the bongos, and the music wasn’t so bad; but that part at the beginning, that had to be the same: that was hard.
In the Havana nightclub scene some of the students had to do some sort of dance that had to be choreographed. So the director had gotten the wife of one of the guys at Caltech, who was a choreographer working at that time for Universal Studios, to teach the boys how to dance. She liked our drumming, and when the shows were over, she asked us if we would like to drum in San Francisco for a ballet.
“WHAT?”
Yes. She was moving to San Francisco, and was choreographing a ballet for a small ballet school there. She had the idea of creating a ballet in which the music was nothing but percussion. She wanted Ralph and me to come over to her house before she moved and play the different rhythms that we knew, and from those she would make up a story that went with the rhythms.
Ralph had some misgivings, but I encouraged him to go along with this adventure. I did insist, however, that she not tell anybody there that I was a professor of physics, Nobel Prize-winner, or any other baloney. I didn’t want to do the drumming if I was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said, If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it’s not so much that he does it well, as that he does it at all. I didn’t want to do it if I was a physics professor doing it at all; we were just some musicians she had found in Los Angeles, who were going to come up and play this drum music that they had composed.
So we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked out. She took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this story cooked up in her mind and said, “OK, I want fifty-two repetitions of this; forty bars of that; whatever of this, that, this, that …”
We went home, and the next night we made a tape at Ralph’s house. We played all the rhythms for a few minutes, and then Ralph made some cuts and splices with his tape recorder to get the various lengths right. She took a copy of our tape with her when she moved, and began training the dancers with it in San Francisco.
Meanwhile we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty-two cycles of this, forty cycles of that, and so on. What we had done spontaneously (and spliced) earlier, we now had to learn exactly. We had to imitate our own damn tape!
The big problem was counting. I thought Ralph would know how to do that because he’s a musician, but we both discovered something funny. The “playing department” in our minds was also the “talking department” for counting—we couldn’t play and count at the same time!
When we got to our first rehearsal in San Francisco, we discovered that by watching the dancers we didn’t have to count because the dancers went through certain motions.
There were a number of things that happened to us because we were supposed to be professional musicians and I wasn’t. For example, one of the scenes was about a beggar woman who sifts through the sand on a Caribbean beach where the society ladies, who had come out at the beginning of the ballet, had been. The music that the choreographer had used to create this scene was made on a special drum that Ralph and his father had made rather amateurishly some years before, and out of which we had never had much luck in getting a good tone. But we discovered that if we sat opposite each other on chairs and put this “crazy drum” between us on our knees, with one guy beating bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda rapidly with his two fingers, constantly, the other fella could push on the drum in different places with his two hands and change the pitch. Now it would go booda— booda— booda— bidda— beeda— beeda— beeda— bidda— booda-booda-booda-badda-bidda-bidda-bidda-badda, creating a lot of interesting sounds.
Well, the dancer who played the beggar woman wanted the rises and falls to coincide with her dance (our tape had been made arbitrarily for this scene), so she proceeded to explain to us what she was going to do: “First, I do four of these movements this way; then I bend down and sift through the sand this way for eight counts; then I stand and turn this way.” I knew damn well I couldn’t keep track of this, so I interrupted her:
“Just go ahead and do the dance, and I’ll play along.”
“But don’t you want to know how the dance goes? You see, after I’ve finished the second sifting part, I go for eight counts over this way.” It was no use; I couldn’t remember anything, and I wanted to interrupt her again, but then there was this problem: I would look like I was not a real musician!
Well, Ralph covered for me very smoothly by explaining, “Mr. Feynman has a special technique for this type of situation: He prefers to develop the dynamics directly and intuitively, as he sees you dance. Let’s try it once that way, and if you’re not satisfied, we can correct it.”
Well, she was a first-rate dancer, and you could anticipate what she was going to do. If she was going to dig into the sand, she would get ready to go down into the sand; every motion was smooth and expected, so it was rather easy to make the bzzzzs and bshshs and boodas and biddas with my hands quite appropriate to what she was doing, and she was very satisfied with it. So we got past that moment where we might have had our cover blown.
The ballet was kind of a success. Although there weren’t many people in the audience, the people who came to see the performances liked it very much.
Before we went to San Francisco for the rehearsals and the performances, we weren’t sure of the whole idea. I mean, we thought the choreographer was insane: first, the ballet has only percussion; second, that we’re good enough to make music for a ballet and get paid for it was surely crazy! For me, who had never had any “culture,” to end up as a professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it were.
We didn’t think that she’d be able to find ballet dancers who would be willing to dance to our drum music. (As a matter of fact, there was one prima donna from Brazil, the wife of the Portuguese consul, who decided it was beneath her to dance to it.) But the other dancers seemed to like it very much, and my heart felt good when we played for them for the first time in rehearsal. The delight they felt when they heard how our rhythms really sounded (they had until then been using our tape played on a small cassette recorder) was genuine, and I had much more confidence when I saw how they reacted to our actual playing. And from the comments of the people who had come to the performances, we realized that we were a success.
The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African phrases to sing at the beginning (GAwa baNYUma GAwa WO, or something like that), and I practiced them until I had them just so.
Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn’t figure out how to make elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of papier mвchй were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance in front of them.
We didn’t offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home, listening to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a sudden I was hypnotized.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, “Tusks!” Behind him, on the floor, were these enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!
He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great relief of the dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner Erhard.
The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a high-quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers there in France to do a small section of the ballet—that’s how she entered the contest.
She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only two left—a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America, with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a ballet which had nothing but our drum music.
She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn’t a popularity contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the judges afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.
“Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle enough. Controlled crescendoes were missing..
And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.
Altered States
I used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft Company, and one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting around with the receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came in—a man, a woman, and a few others. I had never seen them before. The man said, “Is this where Professor Feynman is giving some lectures?”
“This is the place,” the receptionist replied.
The man asks if his group can come to the lectures.
“I don’t think you’d like ‘em much,” I say. “They’re kind of technical.”
Pretty soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: “I bet you’re Professor Feynman!”
It turned out the man was John Lilly, who had earlier done some work with dolphins. He and his wife were doing some research into sense deprivation, and had built some tanks.
“Isn’t it true that you’re supposed to get hallucinations under those circumstances?” I asked, excitedly.
“That is true indeed.”
I had always had this fascination with the images from dreams and other images that come to the mind that haven’t got a direct sensory source, and how it works in the head, and I wanted to see hallucinations. I had once thought to take drugs, but I got kind of scared of that: I love to think, and I don’t want to screw up the machine. But it seemed to me that just lying around in a sense-deprivation tank had no physiological danger, SO I was very anxious to try it.
I quickly accepted the Lillys’ invitation to use the tanks, a very kind invitation on their part, and they came to listen to the lecture with their group.
So the following week I went to try the tanks. Mr. Lilly introduced me to the tanks as he must have done with other people. There were lots of bulbs, like neon lights, with different gases in them. He showed me the Periodic Table and made up a lot of mystic hokey-poke about different kinds of lights that have different kinds of influences. He told me how you get ready to go into the tank by looking at yourself in the mirror with your nose up against it—all kinds of wicky-wack things, all kinds of gorp. I didn’t pay any attention to the gorp, but I did everything because I wanted to get into the tanks, and I also thought that perhaps such preparations might make it easier to have hallucinations. So I went through everything according to the way he said. The only thing that proved difficult was choosing what color light I wanted, especially as the tank was supposed to be dark inside.
A sense-deprivation tank is like a big bathtub, but with a cover that comes down. It’s completely dark inside, and because the cover is thick, there’s no sound. There’s a little pump that pumps air in, but it turns out you don’t need to worry about air because the volume of air is rather large, and you’re only in there for two or three hours, and you don’t really consume a lot of air when you breathe normally. Mr. Lilly said that the pumps were there to put people at ease, so I figured it’s just psychological, and asked him to turn the pump off, because it made a little bit of noise.
The water in the tank has Epsom salts in it to make it denser than normal water, so you float in it rather easily. The temperature is kept at body temperature, or 94, or something—he had it all figured out. There wasn’t supposed to be any light, any sound, any temperature sensation, no nothing! Once in a while you might drift over to the side and bump slightly, or because of condensation on the ceiling of the tank a drop of water might fall, but these slight disturbances were very rare.
I must have gone about a dozen times, each time spending about two and a half hours in the tank. The first time I didn’t get any hallucinations, but after I had been in the tank, the Lillys introduced me to a man billed as a medical doctor, who told me about a drug called ketamine, which was used as an anesthetic. I’ve always been interested in questions related to what happens when you go to sleep, or what happens when you get conked out, so they showed me the papers that came with the medicine and gave me one tenth of the normal dose.
I got this strange kind of feeling which I’ve never been able to figure out whenever I tried to characterize what the effect was. For instance, the drug had quite an effect on my vision; I felt I couldn’t see clearly. But when I’d look hard at something, it would be OK. It was sort of as if you didn’t care to look at things; you’re sloppily doing this and that, feeling kind of woozy, but as soon as you look, and concentrate, everything is, for a moment at least, all right. I took a book they had on organic chemistry and looked at a table full of complicated substances, and to my surprise was able to read them.
I did all kinds of other things, like moving my hands toward each other from a distance to see if my fingers would touch each other, and although I had a feeling of complete disorientation, a feeling of an inability to do practically anything, I never found a specific thing that I couldn’t do.
As I said before, the first time in the tank I didn’t get any hallucinations, and the second time I didn’t get any hallucinations. But the Lillys were very interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They often gave me lunch, and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a different level than the early stuff with the lights. I realized that other people had found the sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me it was a pretty interesting invention. I wasn’t afraid because I knew what it was: it was just a tank of Epsom salts.
The third time there was a man visiting—I met many interesting people there—who went by the name Baba Ram Das. He was a fella from Harvard who had gone to India and had written a popular book called Be Here Now. He related how his guru in India told him how to have an “out-of-body experience” (words I had often seen written on the bulletin board): Concentrate on your breath, on how it goes in and out of your nose as you breathe.
I figured I’d try anything to get a hallucination, and went into the tank. At some stage of the game I suddenly realized that—it’s hard to explain—I’m an inch to one side. In other words, where my breath is going, in and out, in and out, is not centered: My ego is off to one side a little bit, by about an inch.
I thought: “Now where is the ego located? I know everybody thinks the seat of thinking is in the brain, but how do they know that?” I knew already from reading things that it wasn’t so obvious to people before a lot of psychological studies were made. The Greeks thought the seat of thinking was in the liver, for instance. I wondered, “Is it possible that where the ego is located is learned by children looking at people putting their hand to their head when they say, ‘Let me think’? Therefore the idea that the ego is located up there, behind the eyes, might be conventional!” I figured that if I could move my ego an inch to one side, I could move it further. This was the beginning of my hallucinations.
I tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into the middle of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the shoulder, I felt it “up there,” above where “I” was. Every time a drop came I was startled a little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck to the usual place. Then I would have to work my way down again. At first it took a lot of work to go down each time, but gradually it got easier. I was able to get myself all the way down to the loins, to one side, but that was about as far as I could go for quite a while.
It was another time I was in the tank when I decided that if I could move myself to my loins, I should he able to get completely outside of my body. So I was able to “sit to one side.” It’s hard to explain—I’d move my hands and shake the water, and although I couldn’t see them, I knew where they were. But unlike in real life, where the hands are to each side, part way down, they were both to one side! The feeling in my fingers and everything else was exactly the same as normal, only my ego was sitting outside, “observing” all this.
From then on I had hallucinations almost every time, and was able to move further and further outside of my body. It developed that when I would move my hands I would see them as sort of mechanical things that were going up and down—they weren’t flesh; they were mechanical. But I was still able to feel everything. The feelings would be exactly consistent with the motion, but I also had this feeling of “he is that.” “I” even got out of the room, ultimately, and wandered about, going some distance to locations where things happened that I had seen earlier another day.
I had many types of out-of-the-body experiences. One time, for example, I could “see” the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I moved my fingers, I saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I saw the blue sky. Of course that wasn’t right; it was a hallucination. But the point is that as I moved my fingers, their movement was exactly consistent with the motion that I was imagining that I was seeing. The entire imagery would appear, and be consistent with what you feel and are doing, much like when you slowly wake up in the morning and are touching something (and you don’t know what it is), and suddenly it becomes clear what it is. So the entire imagery would suddenly appear, except it’s unusual, in the sense that you usually would imagine the ego to be located in front of the back of the head, but instead you have it behind the back of the head.
“This is the place,” the receptionist replied.
The man asks if his group can come to the lectures.
“I don’t think you’d like ‘em much,” I say. “They’re kind of technical.”
Pretty soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: “I bet you’re Professor Feynman!”
It turned out the man was John Lilly, who had earlier done some work with dolphins. He and his wife were doing some research into sense deprivation, and had built some tanks.
“Isn’t it true that you’re supposed to get hallucinations under those circumstances?” I asked, excitedly.
“That is true indeed.”
I had always had this fascination with the images from dreams and other images that come to the mind that haven’t got a direct sensory source, and how it works in the head, and I wanted to see hallucinations. I had once thought to take drugs, but I got kind of scared of that: I love to think, and I don’t want to screw up the machine. But it seemed to me that just lying around in a sense-deprivation tank had no physiological danger, SO I was very anxious to try it.
I quickly accepted the Lillys’ invitation to use the tanks, a very kind invitation on their part, and they came to listen to the lecture with their group.
So the following week I went to try the tanks. Mr. Lilly introduced me to the tanks as he must have done with other people. There were lots of bulbs, like neon lights, with different gases in them. He showed me the Periodic Table and made up a lot of mystic hokey-poke about different kinds of lights that have different kinds of influences. He told me how you get ready to go into the tank by looking at yourself in the mirror with your nose up against it—all kinds of wicky-wack things, all kinds of gorp. I didn’t pay any attention to the gorp, but I did everything because I wanted to get into the tanks, and I also thought that perhaps such preparations might make it easier to have hallucinations. So I went through everything according to the way he said. The only thing that proved difficult was choosing what color light I wanted, especially as the tank was supposed to be dark inside.
A sense-deprivation tank is like a big bathtub, but with a cover that comes down. It’s completely dark inside, and because the cover is thick, there’s no sound. There’s a little pump that pumps air in, but it turns out you don’t need to worry about air because the volume of air is rather large, and you’re only in there for two or three hours, and you don’t really consume a lot of air when you breathe normally. Mr. Lilly said that the pumps were there to put people at ease, so I figured it’s just psychological, and asked him to turn the pump off, because it made a little bit of noise.
The water in the tank has Epsom salts in it to make it denser than normal water, so you float in it rather easily. The temperature is kept at body temperature, or 94, or something—he had it all figured out. There wasn’t supposed to be any light, any sound, any temperature sensation, no nothing! Once in a while you might drift over to the side and bump slightly, or because of condensation on the ceiling of the tank a drop of water might fall, but these slight disturbances were very rare.
I must have gone about a dozen times, each time spending about two and a half hours in the tank. The first time I didn’t get any hallucinations, but after I had been in the tank, the Lillys introduced me to a man billed as a medical doctor, who told me about a drug called ketamine, which was used as an anesthetic. I’ve always been interested in questions related to what happens when you go to sleep, or what happens when you get conked out, so they showed me the papers that came with the medicine and gave me one tenth of the normal dose.
I got this strange kind of feeling which I’ve never been able to figure out whenever I tried to characterize what the effect was. For instance, the drug had quite an effect on my vision; I felt I couldn’t see clearly. But when I’d look hard at something, it would be OK. It was sort of as if you didn’t care to look at things; you’re sloppily doing this and that, feeling kind of woozy, but as soon as you look, and concentrate, everything is, for a moment at least, all right. I took a book they had on organic chemistry and looked at a table full of complicated substances, and to my surprise was able to read them.
I did all kinds of other things, like moving my hands toward each other from a distance to see if my fingers would touch each other, and although I had a feeling of complete disorientation, a feeling of an inability to do practically anything, I never found a specific thing that I couldn’t do.
As I said before, the first time in the tank I didn’t get any hallucinations, and the second time I didn’t get any hallucinations. But the Lillys were very interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They often gave me lunch, and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a different level than the early stuff with the lights. I realized that other people had found the sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me it was a pretty interesting invention. I wasn’t afraid because I knew what it was: it was just a tank of Epsom salts.
The third time there was a man visiting—I met many interesting people there—who went by the name Baba Ram Das. He was a fella from Harvard who had gone to India and had written a popular book called Be Here Now. He related how his guru in India told him how to have an “out-of-body experience” (words I had often seen written on the bulletin board): Concentrate on your breath, on how it goes in and out of your nose as you breathe.
I figured I’d try anything to get a hallucination, and went into the tank. At some stage of the game I suddenly realized that—it’s hard to explain—I’m an inch to one side. In other words, where my breath is going, in and out, in and out, is not centered: My ego is off to one side a little bit, by about an inch.
I thought: “Now where is the ego located? I know everybody thinks the seat of thinking is in the brain, but how do they know that?” I knew already from reading things that it wasn’t so obvious to people before a lot of psychological studies were made. The Greeks thought the seat of thinking was in the liver, for instance. I wondered, “Is it possible that where the ego is located is learned by children looking at people putting their hand to their head when they say, ‘Let me think’? Therefore the idea that the ego is located up there, behind the eyes, might be conventional!” I figured that if I could move my ego an inch to one side, I could move it further. This was the beginning of my hallucinations.
I tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into the middle of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the shoulder, I felt it “up there,” above where “I” was. Every time a drop came I was startled a little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck to the usual place. Then I would have to work my way down again. At first it took a lot of work to go down each time, but gradually it got easier. I was able to get myself all the way down to the loins, to one side, but that was about as far as I could go for quite a while.
It was another time I was in the tank when I decided that if I could move myself to my loins, I should he able to get completely outside of my body. So I was able to “sit to one side.” It’s hard to explain—I’d move my hands and shake the water, and although I couldn’t see them, I knew where they were. But unlike in real life, where the hands are to each side, part way down, they were both to one side! The feeling in my fingers and everything else was exactly the same as normal, only my ego was sitting outside, “observing” all this.
From then on I had hallucinations almost every time, and was able to move further and further outside of my body. It developed that when I would move my hands I would see them as sort of mechanical things that were going up and down—they weren’t flesh; they were mechanical. But I was still able to feel everything. The feelings would be exactly consistent with the motion, but I also had this feeling of “he is that.” “I” even got out of the room, ultimately, and wandered about, going some distance to locations where things happened that I had seen earlier another day.
I had many types of out-of-the-body experiences. One time, for example, I could “see” the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I moved my fingers, I saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I saw the blue sky. Of course that wasn’t right; it was a hallucination. But the point is that as I moved my fingers, their movement was exactly consistent with the motion that I was imagining that I was seeing. The entire imagery would appear, and be consistent with what you feel and are doing, much like when you slowly wake up in the morning and are touching something (and you don’t know what it is), and suddenly it becomes clear what it is. So the entire imagery would suddenly appear, except it’s unusual, in the sense that you usually would imagine the ego to be located in front of the back of the head, but instead you have it behind the back of the head.