See tickle the dragon's tail in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
Download JSON data for tickle the dragon's tail meaning in English (5.4kB)
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"etymology_text": "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.",
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"text": "Climbing so close to an erupting volcano was tickling the dragon's tail.",
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"text": "Don't tell him the headline's misprinted; you don't want to tickle the dragon's tail.",
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"text": "The laboratory head tickles the dragon's tail whenever we have guests as a show of machismo.",
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{
"ref": "1957, Jim Harman, “Break a Leg”, in Galaxy Magazine, volume 6, numbers 1-6, page 130",
"text": "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",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1993, James Erwin Schevill, 5 Plays 5, page 52",
"text": "PHYSICIST SLOTIN (manipulating the two hemispheres of the bomb at a table): Come closer. Watch me tickle the Dragon's tail",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1995, George Robert Caron, Charlotte E. Meares, Fire of a Thousand Suns: The George R. \"Bob\" Caron Story, page 219",
"text": "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.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2003, Jonathan P. Binstock, Jim Sanborn, Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction, page 13",
"text": "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",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
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"examples": [
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"text": "The laboratory head tickles the dragon's tail whenever we have guests as a show of machismo.",
"type": "example"
},
{
"ref": "1957, Jim Harman, “Break a Leg”, in Galaxy Magazine, volume 6, numbers 1-6, page 130",
"text": "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",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1993, James Erwin Schevill, 5 Plays 5, page 52",
"text": "PHYSICIST SLOTIN (manipulating the two hemispheres of the bomb at a table): Come closer. Watch me tickle the Dragon's tail",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1995, George Robert Caron, Charlotte E. Meares, Fire of a Thousand Suns: The George R. \"Bob\" Caron Story, page 219",
"text": "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.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2003, Jonathan P. Binstock, Jim Sanborn, Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction, page 13",
"text": "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",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality."
],
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.