
Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator - orcul
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/felicia-ferret-particle-accelerator-fermilab
======
imglorp
I've had six ferrets at a time. Whoever coined "barrel of monkeys" never met a
business of ferrets: a swirling ball of play, character, and mischief looking
for trouble. They'll steal anything not tied down and hide it under the couch
usually. Their favorite toy is a length of dryer exhaust hose: they spend
hours running through and ambushing whoever comes out the end.

~~~
jxcl
Thank you for introducing me to the fact that a collection of ferrets is
called a "business".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret#Etymology)

~~~
ada1981
>> A male ferret is called a hob; a female ferret is a jill. A spayed female
is a sprite, a neutered male is a gib, and a vasectomised male is known as a
hoblet. Ferrets under one year old are known as kits. A group of ferrets is
known as a "business", or historically as a "busyness". Other purported
collective nouns, including "besyness", "fesynes", "fesnyng", and "feamyng",
appear in some dictionaries, but are almost certainly ghost words. <<

~~~
twic
This reminds me, that an old name for a rabbit is a "coney", and an old name
for a rabbit warren is a "coney-borough", a fortified town of rabbits. Over
time, that became simply "burrow".

~~~
meko
Interesting, since the dutch word for rabbit is 'Konijn', pronounced like
'konen'.

~~~
dekhn
Coney Island in NY is named for the Dutch, "Rabbit Island"

~~~
ncmncm
Spain was named by the Phoenicians after the huge number of rabbits they saw
there. But they had no word for rabbit, so they used their word for hyraxes.

Which are, by the way, the closest extant taxon to the elephants. Which
themselves are named just for their thick skin.

~~~
twic
Hyraxes, in turn, look rather like chunky ferrets. As you say, they aren't
closely related, but i suppose if you're a mammal which lives in holes in the
ground, there aren't many body shapes which work.

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twic
The Chappel Beer Festival, which is a beer festival in Chappel, Essex, is for
some reason associated with a local ferret welfare charity, who turn up and
run fundraising ferret events. There is a ferret tombola, where a ferret is
put into a hexagonal hutch with pipes leading out of each side, and you bet on
which one it will come out of, and ferret racing, where ferrets do two laps of
a length corrugated pipe, and again, you bet on which will do it fastest:

[https://thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc...](https://thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc_3199.jpg)

It's remarkably entertaining, although of course having money riding on it
always heightens the thrill.

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rhn_mk1
I hate to be nitpicking, but "billion-electron-volt (BeV)" in the first
sentence... hurts.

~~~
anonytrary
It should read GeV (giga) correct?

~~~
rhn_mk1
It's hard to tell without referring to external sources. It could be either
GeV or TeV.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion)

~~~
eigenloss
BeV would never mean TeV outside of the UK.

~~~
petschge
The long scale where "billion" means 1e12 is not that rare:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_sca...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_scale_users)

~~~
ascorbic
But hasn't been used in the UK for at least a generation.

------
thomasjudge
Things one doesn't read very often: "ferret poop in a tube would stop a
proton, too"

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fiftyacorn
My first thought was must be Yorkshire - wasnt disappointed -

"Robert Sheldon, a British engineer who’d been brought on to NAL to find
“shortcuts and money-saving ideas,” suggested a ferret, equipped with a
cleaning tool, could do the job, scampering through the vacuum tubes as if
flushing rabbits out of a warren. “In his part of Yorkshire, hunters used
ferrets,”"

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tyingq
_" A necropsy revealed a ruptured abscess in her intestinal tract."_

Makes you wonder if she ate some of those metal fragments.

~~~
Griffinsauce
Probably not, some ferrets are keen to eat everything soft, including rubber,
but metal? Not really.

Could be due to a suboptimal diet though, ferrets have very short intestines,
can't digest anything besides meat and easily develop problems because of
that.

~~~
tyingq
I was assuming something like licking shavings off its own fur, like a cat
might. But I don't know anything about ferrets...

------
userbinator
I suspect particle physicists and petroleum engineers didn't share much
knowledge, otherwise they may have used
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging)
instead.

(That article contains a photo with an interesting caption when taken out of
context: "Inserting a pig into a natural gas pipeline".)

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exelius
Ferrets absolutely love running through tight tunnels!

I’ve heard stories (maybe apocryphal?) that ferrets are/were used to run pull
cord in long underground fiber conduit runs.

~~~
wolfgang42
Definitely not apocryphal:

"Ferrets: The World's Cutest Working Cable Guys | Superpets" \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL4zI6rXjI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL4zI6rXjI4)

[https://www.cablexpress.com/blog/ferrets-the-best-kept-
secre...](https://www.cablexpress.com/blog/ferrets-the-best-kept-secret-in-
cabling/)

[https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-
xpm-1999-10-03-99100...](https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-
xpm-1999-10-03-9910030091-story.html) (warning: 90% ads)

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/754...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7541455/Ferrets-
key-to-bridging-the-digital-divide-between-cities-and-rural-areas.html)

[http://www.cypresskeep.com/Ferretfiles/Working.htm](http://www.cypresskeep.com/Ferretfiles/Working.htm)

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/582123.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/582123.stm)

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PhasmaFelis
Title is a bit odd. From what I can tell, they _did_ put a ferret in a
particle accelerator. :)

~~~
combatentropy
Agreed. A better use of space would be, "In 1971, Fermilab used a ferret to
clean its particle accelerator."

~~~
Lowkeyloki
Yeah, but then it's just a fact and nobody clicks on it.

Personally, I'd love a website (or browser plugin or something) that reduced
long articles down to a few sentences. That way I could choose whether the
actual subject was interesting enough to spend the time reading the whole
thing.

------
api
Way to introduce invasive species to parallel universes...

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Erwin
Animals in hard science -- that reminds me of the "Always Mount a Scratch
Monkey" story: [https://edp.org/monkey.htm](https://edp.org/monkey.htm) (it
did NOT end well).

~~~
Lowkeyloki
I choose to believe that story is nothing more than apocryphal folklore. And
nothing you can say will convince me otherwise. :-/

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Udik
They could have used a string with a tiny piece of metal at the front, and
simply "accelerated" it through the conduct. Slower than a proton though :). I
wonder if they could activate each of the magnets independently.

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ncmncm
They didn't "try". They did. (I did not.)

Many times. Unnecessarily, as it turned out.

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Nbadal
The ferret equivalent of a vacuum cleaner and a plastic bag and string being
pulled through a pipe.

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decker
I wonder if they had a contingency plan for the ferret dying inside the tube.

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subcosmos
To ferret out a leak!

~~~
rzzzt
ferrite

