Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator | Hacker News Reader

Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator

atlasobscura.com

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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.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret#Etymology

>> 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. <<

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".

Pronounced, originally, to rhyme with "honey" and "money". The obvious vulgar homophony explains why the word is obsolete today and, when it is used (as, for example, in the toponym "Coney Island"), is invariably pronounced to rhyme with "phony" and "bony." Mind you, the pun would already have been perceived in the original Latin (cuniculus/cunnus) and indeed this pair may ultimately be related; cuniculus (whence also conejo, coniglio, coelho, Kanin[chen], etc.) meant not just "rabbit" but also "rabbit hole."

> Pronounced, originally, to rhyme with "honey" and "money".

Or "bunny"? :-)

Of course, that word is of a completely different etymology (Scottish).

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

In scandinavian languages (including Finnish, which hints at the fact that they don't have a lot of rabbits there) it's very similar: "kanin", pronounced ka-neen. Apparently it traces via old French and German back to the Latin "cuniculus" which actually means rabbit.

Meanwhile, "hare" (or "Hase" in German) remains also in English.

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

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.

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.

As both Dutch and English are West Germanic languages, close cognates are pretty common

Coinín in Irish.

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In fact, most of the English "terms of venery", the collective nouns for groups of animals, have been simply made up with a rather obvious humorous intent. It is a testament to some sort of linguistic OCD disorder to keep insisting that these are actual terms- I doubt anybody has ever practically referred to groups of ferrets as "businesses", groups of owls as "parliaments", groups of hyenas as "cowardices" or groups of butterflies as "kaleidoscopes". These terms are not born of usage and have basically only ever served as displays of erudition. It would be time for the English language to recognize they're just made up and pointless.

It's worth noting that in some sense, all words are just made up.

Yes, but made up as conventions between people who need a practical way of communicating something. If there is no such need, and the names are not practical for communication, it's more of an in-joke.

Somehow this reminds me of the Borges' tale "Funes the memorious". Being blessed or cursed with a prodigious and absolutely infallible memory, Funes invents his own numeration system which simply assigns to each number a different, arbitrary word from the dictionary. He claims that saying "Napoleon", for example, is way faster than "one thousand two hundred seventy six".

How were they made up? Who came up with these?

Apparently the invention and usage of ultra-specific collective nouns for animals (related to hunting) was fashionable in courts in the 14th and 15th century [1].

Most of the sources about collective nouns refer to the "Book of Saint Albans" as the origin of a large number of them [2]. But the book was meant to humorous, and includes collective nouns even for groups of people: "a superfluity of nuns", "a melody of harpers", "a doctrine of doctors", etc.

I imagine it was a fashionable court game to recite all the hilarious collective names for a vast number of animals and professions. Still, completely pointless from the point of view of communication.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Saint_Albans

A whole group of ferrets scurrying around and shouting "business!" is how I picture the inside of every corporate office. — https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7ub8l2/comment/d...

A great book on collective nouns is "An Exaltation of Larks" by James Lipton. It's hilarious and fascinating.

https://www.bookdepository.com/Exaltation-Larks-James-Lipton...

You may enjoy my favorite collective noun- a parliament of owls!

Group of crows = murder

Absolutely, ferrets are first rate company, and never a dull moment. Except, that is, when play abruptly stops because everybody momentarily goes to sleep.

At least in English, mustelids have inspired a good many verbs. You can weasel, you can badger, you can ferret. Unsurprising, really, once you get acquainted with their extremely personable nature.

> when play abruptly stops bedause everybody moentarily goes to sleep

Or they've all hatched a new plot and run off to hide... And then fell asleep there.

We had a brother and sister pair growing up.

What fun and funny creatures.

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...

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

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

It looks like it may be an antiquated term?

From the National Accelerator Laboratory Groundbreaking press release:

"Groundbreaking will be held Sunday, December 1, 1968, near here for the first permanent building in the research complex of the National Accelerator Laboratory (NAL) where the 200 Billion Electron Volt (BeV) accelerator will be located." [http://history.fnal.gov/groundbreaking.html]

It should read GeV (giga) correct?

Yes. The early seventies is when we so tens to hundres of GeV and even the LHC has only reached 6.5 TeV (per direction), well short of the alternative interpretation of 200 TeV.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

BeV would never mean TeV outside of the UK.

The long scale where "billion" means 1e12 is not that rare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_sca...

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

Confusing, yes. In this case, it's GeV.

Should have been milliard-electron-volt, right?

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

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,”"

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

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

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.

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

I suspect particle physicists and petroleum engineers didn't share much knowledge, otherwise they may have used 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".)

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.

Definitely not apocryphal:

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

https://www.cablexpress.com/blog/ferrets-the-best-kept-secre...

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

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/754...

http://www.cypresskeep.com/Ferretfiles/Working.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/582123.stm

If I knew about ferrets before various endeavors that involved full-size fiber conduit, tenis balls, strings, duct tape and household vacuum cleaners, I would certainly have saved a lot of effort and research ;)

[Edit: and obviously: lard ;)]

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

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

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.

Way to introduce invasive species to parallel universes...

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

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

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.

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

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!

ferrite

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