I just went through security at St Pancras, to catch a Eurostar to Brussels for discussions on a new ESFRI roadmap. ESFRI is the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure and provides a mechanism for setting priorities in big science infrastructure in Europe, as a guide to investment by governments and the EU. I am attending as a follow-on from being involved in the European strategy update for particle physics. Those priorities have to now be interleaved somehow with the ones from other areas of science.

Passing through security, I always breathe a sigh of relief when my bag doesn’t get searched. I am aware of one or two unfortunate incidents with physicists and security checks. There’s the colleague who drew unwelcome attention by transporting lead-tungstate crystals for the CMS calorimeter; crystals that look like glass to the eye, but like lead to the scanner¹. There were the nervous trips to Hamburg during the first Gulf war carrying odd-looking boxes marked “Oxford Nuclear Physics: Trigger Electronics”.

My most worrying one was in New York, at JFK, after a two-week trip to Nevis labs and Columbia University. We had been working on using data from the ZEUS experiment in Hamburg (the destination for those trigger electronics) to extract information about the distribution of gluons inside the proton. Interesting stuff, and important for the later success of the LHC; for example, the Higgs boson is most often produced by the fusion of pairs of gluons, one from each of the protons we collide. I was a young postdoc and I had a very productive and fun time. The experience was further improved by regular breakfasts at Tom’s Diner, of Suzanne Vega fame.

I was on my way home, at airport security.

“Excuse me sir, but do you have anything unusual in your case?”

I had a big suitcase, which would have been a real pain to unpack and repack, if it came to that.

“…no?” (Puzzled)

“Could you step over here please sir?” Not words you want to hear from airport security. He showed me the scanner picture. Right in the middle of my case was a weird and obviously very solid shape, looking a bit like comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, though of course back then we didn’t know that rock so well, the amazing Rosetta being still under discussion at roadmap meetings much like this one.

I had no idea what it might be. This, I could tell, perturbed the security guy. He called a colleague over, while trying to keep a wary eye on me and on the mystery blob. What had I got that was metal and about 15cm across? I was beginning to get jumpy, nervousness snowballing to panic as I realised every drop of sweat made me look more suspicious.

Suddenly in one of those moments of revelation, the image resolved itself. Into a squirrel. I had bought an iron nutcracker in the shape of a squirrel from a street market, as a present for my parents.

“An iron squirrel!” I shouted with relief. I was probably lucky they didn’t have their guns drawn. But, when they looked at the image, it was now unarguably squirrel-shaped. Laughing, they waved me through.

Today I had no such problem, thank goodness.

On Friday, I went with my daughter to hear Ellen Stofen, NASA Chief Scientist, give the CASE lecture about the NASA science programme and the ambition to go to Mars. Now that is an interesting roadmap. Dr Stofen worked at UCL some time ago, and we were co-sponsoring the event. Andrew Coates from UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory was there too, with a little 3D-printed model of the comet. About the size of a rubber duck, and you could definitely see the resemblance, much more like a duck than a squirrel. I do hope ESA is going to market 67P bathtime toys. I would suggest rubber not iron though, both for buoyancy and to avoid trouble on the way home from Darmstadt.

¹ See chapter 3.7 of Smashing Physics