(e) Mayan hieroglyphics

The reason why Feynman knew anything about Mayan mathematics and astronomy was because he visited Mexico with his second wife, Mary Lou, on their honeymoon. Mary Lou was greatly interested in art history, particularly that of Mexico. On their trip to Mexico, Richard and Mary Lou climbed up and down pyramids, and she had him following her all over the place. She showed him many interesting things, such as the relationships in designs of various figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going up and down in hot and steamy jungles Feynman was exhausted. In some little town in Guatemala, they went into a museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols, pictures, bars, and dots. It was a copy-made by a man called Villacorta-of the Dresden Codex, an original book prepared by the Mayans and found in a museum in Dresden in Germany. Feynman recognized the bars and dots as numbers; he remembered how the Mayans had invented zero-his father had told him that-and had done many interesting things. The museum had copies of the codex for sale and Feynman bought one. On each page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and partial translation of it in Spanish. Feynman loved puzzles and codes, so when he saw the bars and dots he thought he was going to have some fun. He covered the Spanish with a sheet of yellow paper and began to play the game of deciphering the Mayan bars and dots, sitting in the hotel room, while Mary Lou climbed up and down the pyramids all day. Feynman quickly figured out that a bar was equal to five dots, what the symbol for zero was, and so on. It took him a little longer to figure out that the bars and dots carried at twenty the first time, but they carried at eighteen the second time (thus making cycles of 360). He also figured out all kinds of things about various faces: they represented certain days and weeks. Upon his return to California, Feynman continued to work on the codex. He found it a lot of fun to decipher something like that, because when he started he knew nothing about it, he had no clue to go by, but then he noticed certain numbers which appeared often, and added up to other numbers, and so on. There was one place in the codex where the number 584 was very prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. Another prominent number was 2920, which represented 584 x 5 or 365 x 8. There was a table of multiples of 2920 up to 13 x 2920; as far as Feynman could tell, they were intended to calculate errors; only many years later did he figure out what they actually were. Since figures denoting days were associated with the number 584, which was divided up so peculiarly, Feynman figured that it wasn't a mythical number of some sort; it might be an astronomical number. Finally he went down to the astronomy library at Caltech, looked up the relevant books, and found that 583.92 days is the period of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then 236, 90, 250, 8 became apparent: these must represent the phases that Venus goes through. At first, it is a morning star, then it can't be seen (it's on the other side of the sun), and finally it disappears again (it's between the earth and the sun). ,The 90 and 8 are different because Venus moves more slowly through the sky when it is on the far side of the sun compared to when it passes between the earth and sun. The difference between 236 and 250 might indicate a difference between the eastern and western horizons in Maya Land. Feynman discovered another table nearby that had periods of 11 959 days. This turned out to be a table for predicting lunar eclipses. Still another table had multiples of 91 in descending order. Feynman did not figure that one out, nor has anyone else'." When Feynman had worked out as much as he could from the codex, he decided to look at the Spanish commentary of Villacorta to see how much he had been able to figure out. He found the commentary to be 'complete nonsense, so he didn't have to study the commentary anymore. After that, Feynman began to read a lot about the Mayans, especially in the books of the great Mayan expert Eric Thompson. He did all the calculations over again, and figured out that those'funny numbers', which he had at first thought were errors, were in fact integral multiples of the period 583.923; the Mayans had realized that 584 was not exactly right. At the invitation of Nina Byers, Feynman gave a lecture on'Deciphering the Mayan hieroglyphics'in the physics department at UCLA, and repeated it at Caltech. A few days before Feynman's lecture at Caltech, there was a big splurge in the New York Times, which reported that a new codex had been discovered. There were supposed to exist only three codices at that time- hundreds of thousands had been burned by the Spanish as the work of the Devil. Feynman obtained a glossy print of what the New York Times had published with the help of his cousin Frances, who worked for the Associated Press, and proved that it was a fake. It was in the style of the existing codices, but had nothing original in it. '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 position; rather, have tables of multiples of the period with some mysterious "errors" and so on. The numbers would have to be worked out a little bit. , 24

The Beat of a Different Drum p 586.