“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

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 Out of the hundred thousand books originally made we get another fragment, and it has the same thing on it as the other fragments!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.)