Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator

[johnohara]

Early in my career I worked with a bunch of old school phone guys who told me they used to put a harness on a ferret, attached a fish tape, and sent the animal through a fairly long section of pipe in order to pull a 25-pair phone cable they were installing.

They literally "ferreted the pipe" and it was no big deal. There was a rhyme they used for remembering the correct sequence of the colored pairs too.

It wouldn't surprise me if one of the physicist's saw the phone guys doing this during construction.

[chiph]

A common technique these days is to attach the pull string to the handles of a plastic grocery bag, and then use a vacuum (shop-vac) on the other end to suck it through the conduit.

[dguest]

The LHC was brought down by a weasel:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247

It didn't survive.

The article doesn't mention it but a physicist somehow got his hands on it, took it to a taxidermist to have it stuffed, and keeps it in his office.

[frankreyes]

At CERN, the previous accelerator was the LEP. Story goes that when it was constructed and first turned on, it was shutting down due to beam not stable. They found out that someone put a glass bottle of beer right inside one of the beams tube. And the detector of Alice at today's LHC was built using steel by melting down old Soviet tanks.

[voxadam]

What amazes me the most is that physicists managed to turn a ferret into a pig[0] and that they did it in 1971.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging

[GuB-42]

In French, the wire-like tool used by plumbers to unclog pipes is called a furet (ferret). Although it is not the proper term, cable pullers, used by electricians to pull wires into ducts may also be called furet.

Maybe a French physicist took the term literally.

[KineticLensman]

The same technique (ferret pulled wire) was used in the 19th Century to install electrical wiring in Cragside House (UK, Northumberland) without ripping up the antique wooden panelling

[ath0]

Do you want ferret Doctor Manhattan? Because that’s how you get ferret Doctor Manhattan.

[diracs_stache]

Somebody wanted to unseat Schrodinger and the spherical cow for physics animal jokes.

[czbond]

I read the post title and imagined a ferret having it's skin melted like the scene int Raiders of the last ark. I was so wrong.

[neilv]

If they couldn't just blow air through it (to feed the string, or push a swab), what about a specialized motorized vehicle (optionally using a long wire pair cable in place of the string, if that was better than battery onboard, or just swabbing as it goes with no cable/string)?

Did it come down to a $35+maintenance ferret being lower cost?

[dj_mc_merlin]

>> If they couldn't just blow air through it

They could:

> Meanwhile, the engineer Hans Kautzky created a “magnetic ferret” to deal with the debris in the main ring. He attached a dozen Mylar disks to a stainless steel rod, along with a flexible, 700-meter stainless steel cable—the equivalent of Felicia’s string—and a metal-attracting permanent magnet—the counterpart to the cleaning swab. He shot the device through a section of the main ring with compressed air.

>> Did it come down to a $35+maintenance ferret being lower cost?

Probably, since the guy who suggested it was brought there specifically for that reason.

[ilyt]

Read the article and you will know...

[Pxtl]

My nephew used to keep ferrets. Wonderful animals, but tragically short-lived. They seem to just collect cancers like like pokemon cards.

[dumdumchan]

Couldn't they just use pressurized air?

[Pxtl]

That's what they end up doing, in the article. The ferret never did the full 4-mile trek around the cyclotron from my skimming of the article, and only cleaned short (well, 300-foot) sections of the 2nd accelerator that was under construction.

[rsynnott]

A Yorkshireman using a ferret to clean a particle accelerator sounds like something from a comedy sketch, to be honest.

[dj_mc_merlin]

A ferret from Gaylord, Minnesota.

[1letterunixname]

Research into quantum silly walks.

[emsy]

To check if it’s ferret magnetic?

[dumpster_fire]

That's some top tier dad joke.

[grokas]

Well kind of... They used it to clean the tube using magnets.

[MisterTea]

I cant imagine using a ferret or any animal to clean the inside of a vacuum system, let alone a scientific apparatus. These systems need to be clean and free of debris that can trap gas and water vapor or decompose and release more contaminates. Imagine if that ferret pooped and/or urinated in the middle of that 300 foot vacuum pipe. You wont be able to evacuate that pipe as those little turds will outgas and never let you reach the ultra high vacuum level needed for such experiments. Perahaps they accounted for this and used a feeding schedule to determine optimal time to let her run the pipes? It's never mentioned and another scientist developed a pigging method which instantly obsoleted the ferret.

[redtehartykle]

"They placed a custom collar around Felicia’s neck and a diaper around her rear; ferret poop in a tube would stop a proton, too."

[btilly]

They didn't use the ferret to clean it. Just to put a string through it so that they could pull a more traditional cleaning solution through.

[horsawlarway]

They mention in the article that they put a diaper on her.