tickle the dragon's tail
Meanings
verb
- To do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.
- To annoy an irritable person.
- To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality.
Pronunciation
Word forms
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.
Related words
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