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The Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland has generated a lot of news of late, e.g. the announcement that a team had found what it believes to be a particle that traveled faster than he speed of light, an actual new particle, and of course the seemingly never-ending storyline associated with the hopeful discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson, now a physicist not associated with the project, has built a scale model replica of the ATLAS experiment; a particle detector that will likely serve as ground zero should the so-called “god particle” ever be observed.

a physicist with the Niels Bohr Institute took almost thirty five hours to build and cost two thousand Euros (paid for by the high energy physics group at the university). The point of building the replica, he says, is to incite interest in physics. Plus, no doubt, it was sort of fun.

The real ATLAS project is 44 meters long and 22 meters wide and weighs 7000 tonnes. Mehlhase’s model, at approximately 1:50 scale is approximately 1 meter long by a half meter wide. And while the real deal has millions of parts, the model has 9500 pieces, mostly LEGO blocks.