Physicist’s Quest for Adventure Leads to ‘Nomads’

The story of how “Nomads” came to Los Angeles is linked to an intriguing tale about an insatiably curious world-famous physicist, his fellow bongo drum player and their 12-year quest to travel to a remote Shangri-La.

Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman, widely viewed as the world’s leading theoretical physicist of his day before he died of cancer at 69 a year ago this month, was also known as an eccentric, fun-loving adventurer.

One of his obsessions was to visit Tuva, a small Soviet republic in Central Siberia, a desire he shared with his close friend Ralph Leighton. It was this goal that prompted Leighton, a former math teacher who knew nothing about organizing museum exhibits, to take the first steps to bring “Nomads” to America.

Leighton and Feynman made their pact to go to Tuva in 1976. The two men were fascinated by the obscure republic that had once been an independent country, was never mentioned in books they found about its environs, and most important, had a capital city called Kyzyl.

Said Feynman during an interview on the television series “Nova”: “Any place that’s got a capital named K-y-z-y-l has just got to be interesting. . . . We had discovered, you see, a Shangri-La, a place in the world that nobody had visited in a long time. So (we) right then and there looked at each other and said ‘We’ve got to go there.’ ”

“We shook hands and the quest began,” said Leighton during an interview at the Natural History Museum this week.

Both men knew they could easily get to Tuva if Feynman was invited by the Soviet government to lecture in the Soviet Union. “His lectures on physics are required reading over there,” said Leighton, 39, whose father, a Caltech professor, had introduced him to the renowned physicist.

But Feynman, notorious for shunning bureaucratic protocol, didn’t want to go the red-carpet route.

“The whole idea was to have adventure,” he said on “Nova.” “The way to have adventure was to do things at a lower level. Not to ride on the freeway and stop at the Holiday Inn.”

So Feynman and Leighton, who had transcribed tapes for Feynman’s best-selling autobiography, set about planning their own way there. They did research in libraries from San Francisco to Washington and embarked on a letter-writing campaign to see Tuva, its rugged countryside and native peoples, not its modernized hotel rooms.

Becoming pen-pals with such Tuvans as Ondar, a collector of local folk literature, they translated Tuvan to Russian to English, a brain-busting task that yielded “hours and hours of fun,” Leighton said. Whether unlocking the mysteries of quantum electrodynamics or figuring out how to charm and attract the opposite sex, Feynman loved puzzles.

However, all their efforts failed.

But Feynman wasn’t used to failure. A free-thinking iconoclast who taught physics at Caltech for 36 years and won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965, he worked on the development of the atom bomb at Los Alamos, N.M. and served on a presidential commission investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. He also joined a Brazilian samba band, cracked top-secret safes at Los Alamos--a skill he later taught his students--and flew to Paris to play bongos for a ballet competition.

Then came the big break.

On a trip to Moscow in 1985, Leighton met Vladimir N. Basilov and another Soviet organizer of “Nomads”--which, he learned--contained artifacts from Tuva.

“And we got this idea,” Leighton said. “We’d bring the exhibit to California and we’ll become appointed members of whatever museum receives it. Then we’ll go to Tuva as representatives of the museum to inspect the archeological sites and make all the arrangements.”

The plan worked--at least in part. In 1986 Leighton flew to Sweden to see the traveling exhibit, returned home and approached Peter Keller, a programming official at the Natural History Museum. Keller liked the idea of hosting the show and formal negotiations with the Soviets began.

Shangri-La seemed within reach. “When Keller got to Moscow to sign the papers, the first thing he said was ‘We all know why we’re here--because (Feynman and Leighton) want to get to Tuva,’ ” he said. “We thought we were in for sure. We even had our passports updated.”

However, their invitation was delayed for months by red tape. And, Feynman’s health was deteriorating. “He had a fourth operation in the fall of ‘87,” Leighton said, “and recovered rather quickly.”

But it was too late. The invitation arrived a few days after Feynman died.

“That’s the real irony of it. He didn’t even see the invitation,” said Leighton, his eyes misting.

Leighton did finally make it to Tuva. “The Tuvans told me, ‘What the father doesn’t see, the son will.” The trip was largely a disappointment though.

“The reality behind the dream was shattered,” he said. “They kept us inside. They kept us making toasts and we didn’t see one yak, one camel, one reindeer.”

Still, Leighton is happy--and incredulous--that the adventure launched as a lark resulted in a major exhibition of ancient artifacts scheduled to appear here and in two other U.S. cities.

“Feynman always said whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability. Nothing may ever come of it, but maybe something will.”