Charles Mann

So it's sort of stored sun that's coming out

There was a sense of relief that the much delayed flight was finally underway.

Oh, I took this stuff that I got out of your seam, and I put it in ice water.

And I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it, it maintains, it doesn't stretch back, it stays the same dimension.

In other words, for a few seconds at least, and more seconds than that, there's no resilience in this particular material when it's at a temperature of 32 degrees.

I believe that has some significance for our problem.

I'm Ralph Layton, and I'm not sure what I do.

I guess the most consistent thing is that I was a teacher in the Pasadena school district for about a dozen years.

And then when I fell in with Richard Feynman and hearing his stories and getting them out to the world, that helped me branch out and do other things.

Drumming was key.

Without drumming, I don't think I would have had more than a passing relationship, maybe when Feynman was over at our house, because my father was a professor of physics at Caltech, as Feynman was, and they did work on some projects together, most notably what are called the Big Red Books, the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

You'll see three names on the cover for authors, Feynman, Leighton, and Sands.

That Leighton was my father.

That would have been about it.

But since Feynman heard me and my friend Tom Rudishauser outside on the patio drumming on little teak tables from Taiwan, he was drawn out to join us and we specifically left one for him to pick up should he have gone for the bait.

And

He went for the bait and that led to a wonderful relationship.

Feynman and I would get together for drumming, it seemed like, every week and then stories would pop out.

He got a lot of this storytelling aspect from his mother.

And Joan would say that when he and his mom got going back and forth with a repartee, that Joan was literally rolling on the floor laughing.