RICHARD FEYNMAN’S DREAM OF TANNU TUVA.

RICHARD FEYNMAN’S DREAM OF TANNU TUVA. The Google search for the Economist article revealed this article about how Richard Feynman, the great physicist, fell in love (when he was a boy and a stamp collector) with the idea of Tannu Tuva, a country which he had found on a globe. Tuva is the language of Tannu Tuva. Tannu Tuva was remote, a place in Siberia near Outer Mongolia that nobody visited. It was also a place for which it was hard to get permission to visit from the authorities in the Soviet Union (the Soviet Union had swallowed up the country of Tannu Tuva.) Feynman compared Tannu Tuva to Shangri-La. Feynman and his friend Ralph Leighton, near the end of Feynman’s life, learned enough to write and receive letters in Tuvan and had worked out a cultural exchange which would permit them to go to Tannu Tuva. Unfortunately Feyman died before he could make the trip.