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tickle the dragon's tail

To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality.

Etymology:

  • From the obvious risk of tickling a dragon's tail. In physics, it was first used by Richard Feynman to describe the experiments of Louis Slotin at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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The laboratory head tickles the dragon's tail whenever we have guests as a show of machismo.

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Submitted on July 10, 2018

Additional definitions for 'tickle the dragon's tail':

tickle the dragon's tailTo do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.
tickle the dragon's tailTo annoy an irritable person.
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cosquillas en la cola del dragón

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Nearby phrases

Some more phrases from our dictionary similar to tickle the dragon's tail

take a tiger by the tailturn tailtickle someone's pickletickle the twinetail offwhale tailtickle the ivorytail between one's legstickle someone's pickletail wagging the dogwhale tailtickle someone's fancymake head or tail oftickle somebody's funny bone

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    "tickle the dragon's tail." Phrases.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <https://www.phrases.com/phrase/tickle-the-dragons-tail_26706>.

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