The Large Hadron Collider Has Been Recreated In Lego
An anonymous reader writes "The Large Hadron Collider has many fans, and one of its biggest is Sasha Mehlhase, a physicist from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Mehlhase has decided to help promote the LHC to students by taking the time to recreate a 1:50 scale model of it using Lego bricks. In total he spent 81 hours creating it, which was split between 48 hours of designing the model on his laptop, and a further 33 hours putting it together."
and tomorrow he starts building his girlfriend.
Table-ized A.I.
Or proved that Beyblades can exceed the speed of light.
Gently reply
The ATLAS module is not the only module on the LHC but yes still impressive.
.. of the predicted 1x1 block is to let lots of legos collide and look at the resulting blocks.
It's not the whole LHC - it's the detector part.
I see the ATLAS experiment but where's the room-sized Lego tunnel?
so we can all buy this as a kit and have one for ourselves! Very nicely done!
If it was that easy to build an atom smasher every kid would be doing it! Oh wait they are, every time they throw something!!! Must crush, mush destroy, must obliterate! Must!!! Muh ha ha!
What a jip....I can't see the small pieces...
The pictures in TFA show that he (and his friends and poor wife) show that he just built the detectors.
While very impressive, he (obviously) didn't build the complete ring. Even at 1:50 scale it would be a mile in circumference. Now that's a lot of LEGOs!
One of the more useless lego pieces they have produced.
He recreated ATLAS, which is one of the detectors at the LHC, beside ALICE, CMS, LHCb and further smaller experiments.
LHC is 8.6km in diameter. A 1:50 scale model would still be 172 meters in diameter.
This guy built a 1:50 scale model of the ATLAS detector ; the first picture even has the inscriptions "ATLAS" in lego letters.
Wired: Minecraft, Tired: Lego. Expired: Lincoln Logs
I love it when large hadrons collide.
That piece will certainly be a collector's item!
The author suggests that the Lego company should produce models of real-world scientific devices of all levels of complexity, from simple machines, to Tesla coils, etc, all the way up to this. (No, not WORKING Tesla coils!)
I think this is an idea that is well worth pursuing. Granted, it probably won't outsell "Star Wars" toys any time soon, but for one thing, the GEEK FACTOR is off the scale! I think there are plenty of kids (and parents too) who would definitely buy such Lego sets! I'd even be interested, myself... and I'm pushing 50!
Willie...
The second link's title more accurately describes what was built. I also expected to see a giant LEGO ring but I guess if 1:50 scale is still a little too big to build it out of LEGO, I might let it pass this time.
for the Higgs boson to travel back in time from the future and destroy it.
Actually it is the ATLAS Experiment (not module) which is an experiment on the LHC. The LHC actually passes through the middle of the detector.
Wow, 81 hours? And more than half of it designing it? And it's not even the whole thing...
That said, he must have way too much time on his hands.
I wish my Large Hardon Collider was recreated in Lego :(
Let me know when they get around to finding the God brick.
Bricks have been shat
No. LEGO is the brand name. They are LEGO bricks. They are not Legos.
The Higgs Boson is like that oddball tiny LEGO piece that always finds its way down to the bottom of the tub and wedges itself inside another piece.
I chuckled a bit to myself when this posting came up in the Yahoo blog reader with a Google ad for steel and aluminium trench-shoring solutions.
The plural of Lego is Legos.
Well, if you're going to be picky, the singular of "Lego" is "LEGO" :-)
Bonus points for the logic gates diagram on the whiteboard.
ayottesoftware.com
81 hours for a scale model? Tony Stark built a working particle accelerator in a weekend.
who can't get the words Large Hardon Collider out of my mind. Once I thought it I see it every time.
Don't worry, it is designed to make small pieces out of the big pieces until he has some Higgs bricks.
Too bad, I would have like to have seen a Lego black hole created.
Bryan
that would be a 500m by 500m room.
What's with this scourge of Digital Minimalism?
Are our neurons so heavily jaded or taxed by lush vibrant reality which surrounds us, that we achieve some mental orgasma at the sight of some crappy pixelated model of real-life process...? Building with Lego is like, well, uninventing the wheel. Seeing the world through Nintendo glasses.
Or its evil cousin Digital All-or-Nothingism promoted by kindergarten FAIL engineers which has killed broadcast television. DIGITAL TV IS LEGO TV. Where you once had a graceful degradation curve in fringe areas in which an analog television broadcast would go progressively snowy but still viewable (audio still perfect!) over a large area... now you have a useless and terrifying eruption of multicolored boxes accompanied by spurts of silence and blackscreen. If this is progress I'm a blockhead. Just hope them bastards keep their LEGO mitts off of analog FM.
Remember Bell Standard Practices, the smooth audio response curve of analog telephone equipment... balanced pairs, the digital fixed rate ~56k as the rule. The days of long distance dialup BBS where even complex tone protocols could be reliable. Now we have turkey garble bizzlefart cell phones and even long distance circuits for wire telephone providers use gibbering poop compression. Voices sploitch and gurgle like a death rattle. Music on hold sounds like continuous projectile vomit. "MODERN" DIGITAL TELEPHONY IS LEGO TELEPHONY.
And don't get me started about digital "cameras" as opposed to film. The great great grandchildren will think granny was made out of LEGO blocks, the way she looks when they zoom in close. When you zoom in with film people become grainy but they're still, well, people, not nightmarish pixelcritters with beady eyes. Matthew Brady is sobbing in his grave.
Where is it all going? Eventually the whole world will dissolve into a simple square wave like the red pill scene in Matrix and finally the whole universe will go DC. All of existence compressed into one bit.
We are the hollow men
We are the LEGO men
Stuck together
Edges sharp and painful underfoot. Alas!
Our crappy digital voices, when
We whisper together
are rendered as unintelligible by codec errors
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellular
This is the way the conversation ends
This is the way the conversation ends
This is the way the conversation ends
Not by bang or whimper: with a turkey fart.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Did he make a tiny air vent for a tiny Lego bird to drop a tiny Lego biscotti down?
No.
The word lego has now been genericized. It means "small plastic toy brick".
It's plural is legos.
No. It has not. It does not. It is not.
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4003:ok1hd4.2.4
LEGO is a registered trademark. LEGO-brand bricks are not "legos", they are LEGO bricks. Non-LEGO-brand bricks are not "legos", they are small plastic non-LEGO toy bricks.
Using "legos" to refer to them just makes you sound like an uneducated fool. The fact that you've been told otherwise and will continue to do so makes you a stubborn fool. Go right ahead, I won't stop you - although if you have any money I'm sure LEGO would love to sue you into oblivion.