Profusion of Lego

Sometimes you have to admire the way that people can have fun in science.  It seems that the staff of Scientific American have been following the progress of construction of the ITER tokamak and that they are more-or-less prototyping the assembly of the machine . . . in Lego bricks.

ITER - the way forward as envisaged in lego bricks

Read on about it at this link.

Meanwhile, Europe's flagship machine, which is still the largest and most successful tokamak in the world - state of the art but 30 years old - has already been depicted in Lego.  Or at least a relatively realistic version of the JET control room has been built, with nice pictures of the inside of the machine while a pulse is running.

JET Control Room in Lego - by Fernanda Rimini (source here)

I wouldn't like to speculate about which member of staff is represented by Darth Vader.  I think I ought to keep those thoughts to myself!

Small and surprising note:  Did you know that 'Lego' is a name constructed out of the Danish expression leg godt, meaning 'play well'?