Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator

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.

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:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;dsc_3199.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;dsc...</a><p>It&#x27;s remarkably entertaining, although of course having money riding on it always heightens the thrill.

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

Things one doesn&#x27;t read very often: &quot;ferret poop in a tube would stop a proton, too&quot;

My first thought was must be Yorkshire - wasnt disappointed -<p>&quot;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,”&quot;

<i>&quot;A necropsy revealed a ruptured abscess in her intestinal tract.&quot;</i><p>Makes you wonder if she ate some of those metal fragments.

I suspect particle physicists and petroleum engineers didn&#x27;t share much knowledge, otherwise they may have used <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pigging" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pigging</a> instead.<p>(That article contains a photo with an interesting caption when taken out of context: &quot;Inserting a pig into a natural gas pipeline&quot;.)

Ferrets absolutely love running through tight tunnels!<p>I’ve heard stories (maybe apocryphal?) that ferrets are&#x2F;were used to run pull cord in long underground fiber conduit runs.

Title is a bit odd. From what I can tell, they <i>did</i> put a ferret in a particle accelerator. :)

Way to introduce invasive species to parallel universes...

Animals in hard science -- that reminds me of the &quot;Always Mount a Scratch Monkey&quot; story: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edp.org&#x2F;monkey.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edp.org&#x2F;monkey.htm</a> (it did NOT end well).

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

They didn&#x27;t &quot;try&quot;. They did. (I did not.)<p>Many times. Unnecessarily, as it turned out.

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

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

To ferret out a leak!