Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

1602 bliss hill

Savory heaven, 00000

I first heard of you in April of 1999. I was doing some research on time travel and asked a colleague if he happened to have some broad-ranged books on physics. He handed me a book entitled "The Feynman Lectures on Physics." I was unfamiliar with the book or you but read through it to see if there was any information I could use. There was a little, though it was more abstract than what is usually needed in electronics.

After I gleaned what information I could, I returned the book and talked to my friend online, he started talking about you, how you came to lecture for them at M.I.T., and that you are a fascinating person. He said that he even got to meet you after the lecture. Of course none of this meant anything to me, and I figured it had merely been the admiration of a physics student to some great professor. But now I understand what my friend must have known and couldn't convey to me.

I sort of forgot that whole episode and it seems that in 2002 I happened to be watching PBS and the show was something about an adventure to a place called Tuva. It seemed interesting so I continued to watch it. Your name was mentioned and I perked up, having remembered the name on the physics book. As I continued to watch, I began to realize that you were the person who was being interviewed as you told the story about Tannu Tuva. I was a little awed and amazed that THIS you were same guy that had given the physics lectures that I had used in my research. I went to my friend the next day (the one who had loaned me the book years before) and told him what I had seen. He was amused and actually he also knew of Tuva for some reason. So now I understood and he understood that I understood.

But that was the end of it for the time-being, and I didn't think any more about it. Then late in 1994, probably December as best I can recall, I was searching for something somewhere, either in an online service or an encyclopedia, I can't remember. It was one of those searches that takes you bouncing from one article to another and by the time you've finished you can't remember where you've been (or perhaps what you were looking for in the first place). But somewhere during the search I came across a bibliography that included a reference to a book entitled "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and it got me to thinking, hmm... a book by you. I wrote the title on a piece of paper and stuck it in my wallet, and the next time I was in a bookstore I pulled out the paper and went hunting for the book. There it was! I began reading and decided I MUST have that book. I went home and read all night and the next few nights and finished the book. I found out there was a sequel, "What do YOU Care What Other People Think?" so I went back and bought that one too. This time I read a little slower so I could savor what I was reading. But finally I was at the end and there on the back page was a reference to a place where I could order audio recordings of some of the stories I had read, actually spoken by Richard himself. Well, 32 cents is nothing in a quest for information so I wrote to the address. It wasn't long afterward that I received a brown envelope from Ralph Leighton with several pages of information and something called the Tuva Trader. I realized that I was not the only one in the world interested you and that in essence there was a loose-knit