tickle the dragon's tail

A staged reconstruction of Louis Slotin tickling the dragon's tail (sense 3).

Meaning

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.

Origin

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

Modern English dictionary

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