> In September 1971, scientists at the United States National Accelerator Laboratory (NAL), operated by Stanford University at a site in Menlo Park, California, needed to clean microscopic steel particles, known as mesons, from long tubes in a particle accelerator, used for experiments in electron acceleration. [...]
> Robert Sheldon, a British scientist on loan to the NAL, came up with the idea of using a ferret to clean up the mesons (subatomic particles which are intermediate in mass between an electron and a proton, and transmit the strong interaction that binds nucleons together in the atomic nucleus).
The correct meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meson
Notice the "All mesons are unstable, with the longest-lived lasting for only a few tenths of a nanosecond" bit. There is no human-perceivable time interval over which cleaning up mesons could be meaningful.