Felicia the Fermilab Ferret

Nice to see this long overlooked player in particle physics research now getting the recognition she deserves:
Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator

Comments

[Georg]

Now I'm trying to imagine what a ferret in a diaper looks like...

[FanOfMostEverything]

I'd never known about this until now. I definitely need to give Fluttershy a ferret named Felicia in the future.

"You'd probably like her, Twilight. She's very clever. I'm not sure why she needs such a wide, circular burrow, though."

[BlazzingInferno]

5037633
“Or why the rocks across the meadow keep melting”

[Manga Shoggoth]

The moment I saw the picture I thought "The ferret is being used to clean the tube".

While I am impressed, it isn't really a surprise to me - I understand that ferrets have been used to run cables through ducts in aircraft before now - and i doubted that she was running a cable in a particle accelerator, leaving only one option.

It's a living, I guess. At least it's a better job than being stuffed down someone's trousers...

[Pineta]

5037631
I'm sure there are plenty of furry artists who could help you with that.
5037633
I'd read that story. But is circular burrow really the best design? A next generation machine really needs to accelerate electrons and positrons to terraelectronvolt energies, necessitating a linear path to avoid the bremsstrahlung losses.
5037655
A fixed target machine? Yes that needs to be linear.
5037679
It's the length of the tunnels which make it particularly impressive. Sadly it is no longer a career option for young ferrets. Those jobs are now taken by robots.

[Walabio]

A story from back when the USA lead particle-physics. We abdicated when we defunded the SuperConducting Super Collider. Now, we abdicated political leadership of the world too.

Over in Cern, you currently plan the next SuperCollider. We plan nothing.

[Manga Shoggoth]

It's the length of the tunnels which make it particularly impressive. Sadly it is no longer a career option for young ferrets. Those jobs are now taken by robots.

I know - it's so sad when traditional roles are taken over by automation.

[Pineta]

5037968
Despite everything the US is still a very big player in particle physics. American labs are heavily involved in the LHC experiments. There's a remote operations center at Fermilab letting them run the CMS experiment at CERN. Particle physics is global. Whether the next big accelerator will go to CERN is not clear, but Japan or China look like more likely sites.

[Walabio]

5038227

In "the Gods Themselves" by Isaac Asimov, the moon has a gigantic particle accelerator on it. I believe that accelerated protons and antiprotons, and heavy nuclei such as Plutonium 244 to a Lawrence-Contraction of 10^6 and a circumference of 1 MegaMeter with a luminosity of 10⁴⁰ cm⁻²s⁻¹. ¡Now that is a collider!

[Pineta]

5038403
That does sound impressive. Although I hope in the future plasma wakefield accelerators will let us achieve high energies on much smaller scales. The idea of doing a particle physics experiment on the moon reminds me of a story told by Don Perkins (as told here in Neutrino by Frank Close).
images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/fb087425-b3fb-4dc6-9c6f-5d3b403d7979/dd3vlmb-f14c81dc-aa14-463a-85f6-1f64bf6e68b1.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2ZiMDg3NDI1LWIzZmItNGRjNi05YzZmLTVkM2I0MDNkNzk3OVwvZGQzdmxtYi1mMTRjODFkYy1hYTE0LTQ2M2EtODVmNi0xZjY0YmY2ZTY4YjEucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.2Ece2s_coGhuJWyCo9KWWI4t4A9_kwE-OC9zZQ5PxDM

[Walabio]

5038728

One should remember that Isaac Asimov wrote the Gods Themselves in 1972, back when we still had Project Apollo:

If we do not spread beyond Earth, something will kill all of us. Canceling Project Apollo is like the Ming ending the Treasure Voyages. The Chinese could have owned the Age of Exploration in the 15th Century and the USA could have started a Lunar Colony in the 1980s which would have been self-sufficient by the 1990s (at that point, it would not matter whether all humans on Earth would die because we would be a multiworld species).