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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."
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!
Considering the legos required to build this model cost $2,600, I doubt Lego would be selling too many of these sets. This also gives a good idea of just how overpriced these little chunks of plastic are.
Better known as 318230.
It's not the whole LHC - it's the detector part.
Was I the only person who read the summary and thought "even at 1:50 scale, that's going to be damn massive" (couldn't remember the exact size, but I knew it was big- having checked, the circumference of the whole thing is 27km, or around 16 miles)?
Then pretty quickly twigged that they probably hadn't built the whole thing, checked the article, and was right.
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If it genuinely cost that much it would be due to him buying more sets than he needed to get the appropriate pieces. If Lego made a set that wouldn't be required. They obviously have capability to create the bricks he used already. They'd just have to include the right blocks so I'd get it would be in the $100 to $200 range.