Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

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

To check if it’s ferret magnetic?

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.