Dictionary

tickle the dragon's tail en · VERB

Pronunciation

• (Australia) audio

Etymology

From the obvious risk of tickling a dragon's tail. In physics, it was coined by American physicist Richard Feynman to describe the experiments of Louis Slotin at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Meanings

1. (idiomatic) To do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.
   • Climbing so close to an erupting volcano was tickling the dragon's tail.
2. (idiomatic) To annoy an irritable person.
   • Don't tell him the headline's misprinted; you don't want to tickle the dragon's tail.
3. (qualifier:nuclear physics) To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality.
   • Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail. Maybe I was a little old for it, but that's what I was doing there in the Moran III jungle. I got the shield off my cigarette lighter and jerked out the dinky little damper rods for the pile and started easing the two little bricks toward each other with the point of my lead pencil 1957, Jim Harman, “Break a Leg”, in Galaxy Magazine, volume 6, numbers 1-6, page 130:
   • The laboratory head tickles the dragon's tail whenever we have guests as a show of machismo.
   • And so it happened that Japan and the United States had also tickled the dragon's tail. The two subcritical masses called pride and cultural misunderstanding had been shoved together into one critical mass. 1995, George Robert Caron, Charlotte E. Meares, Fire of a Thousand Suns: The George R. "Bob" Caron Story, page 219:
   • PHYSICIST SLOTIN (manipulating the two hemispheres of the bomb at a table): Come closer. Watch me tickle the Dragon's tail 1993, James Erwin Schevill, 5 Plays 5, page 52:
   • Were this assembly functional, a person might manipulate the bricks of the radiant castlelike structure to slow down the neutrons, to "tickle the dragon's tail," as Morland writes 2003, Jonathan P. Binstock, Jim Sanborn, Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction, page 13:

Forms

Relateds

criticality accident

wikipedia: Los Alamos National Laboratory · wikipedia: Louis Slotin