Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator
atlasobscura.comEarly 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.
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.
I used that exact method to clean out a long dryer vent, except using the dryer blower to push the bag and string through.
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.
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.
I hadn't heard that about Alice. The CMS hadronic calorimeter was built from brass in old Russian artillery shell casings.
I'm presuming that the tanks were a source of low-emissivity steel?
I haven't heard of low-emissivity steel. Do you mean low-background steel [1]?
My guess: low background steel is demanded more by low-background experiments like neutrino or dark matter detectors. Most of the LHC experiments work in an environment with enough (intentional) radiation to require special radiation hard electronics. The kind of environment is orders of magnitude more radioactive than the ones where the background radiation from steel becomes important.
But please correct me if I'm wrong!
It may have been a joke... As in, tanks that were not producing much firepower? Don't know xd
Don't have the details, it was a fun fact they told me when I went downstairs there.
What amazes me the most is that physicists managed to turn a ferret into a pig[0] and that they did it in 1971.
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.
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
Do you want ferret Doctor Manhattan? Because that’s how you get ferret Doctor Manhattan.
Somebody wanted to unseat Schrodinger and the spherical cow for physics animal jokes.
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.
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?
>> 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.
Thanks, I thought I read the entire article, but somehow missed that.
> Probably, since the guy who suggested it was brought there specifically for that reason.
Meaning it could be the creative frugal solution for which they were hired, or that it was a good faith attempt towards same, or (in some analogous business situations, I'd guess not in this one) there's incentive to do appear to be doing something.
There was also PR value, including the appearance of being frugal, if there was grumbling about cost of the facility.
Read the article and you will know...
My nephew used to keep ferrets. Wonderful animals, but tragically short-lived. They seem to just collect cancers like like pokemon cards.
Couldn't they just use pressurized air?
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.
A Yorkshireman using a ferret to clean a particle accelerator sounds like something from a comedy sketch, to be honest.
A ferret from Gaylord, Minnesota.
Research into quantum silly walks.
To check if it’s ferret magnetic?
That's some top tier dad joke.
Well kind of... They used it to clean the tube using magnets.
Would the ferret's hair and dander nullify their cleaning efforts?
It will certainly effect the ability to evacuate the piping as the organic material will outgas. I can also decompose from heating releasing more contaminates and ruin the experiment.
The ferret was used to run a string through the tube, which was then used to pull a cleaning swab.
I cant imagine something pulled by such a small animal can seal well enough to trap all the debris. The pigging method uses compressed air to generate a much higher force so a very tight seal can be made to ensure a clean scrub of the walls.
When they are determined, they are surprisingly strong animals. We had one pull a baby gate across our kitchen and living room because it liked the rubber stoppers and wanted to steal them.
Of course, the ferret was only pulling the string through the tube, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was capable of pulling the cleaning plug.
The ferret pulled the string. Technicians pulled the then ferretless string to move the cleaning plug.
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.
"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."
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.
They mention in the article that they put a diaper on her.
I seem to have missed that line somehow. But otherwise still - natural oils, hairs and dander can present an issue.