Join CERN’s scavenger hunt

Can you spot all 20 or so LEGO figurines in the CERN computing centre?

By Michael Banks

You may remember that late last year CERN teamed up with Google Street View to allow users to go on a virtual tour of the lab, including 12 km of the 27 km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel plus the caverns that house the ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE experiments.

This involved Google‘s Zurich team spending two weeks at CERN in 2011 photographing the LHC using a “Street View Trike” – a specially created camera-mounted bike.

Well, what we didn’t known then was that Stefan Lüders, CERN’s computer security officer, had decided to stash about 20 LEGO figurines around the CERN computing centre before the cameras rolled.

Lüders, who is a big LEGO fan, spent about an hour secreting the “minifigures”, which were hidden in some not-so-obvious places and in some cases were even camouflaged.

But now CERN has launched a competition, which will close on 31 January, inviting people to identify the locations of the minifigures.

“It is absolutely amazing to count the number of replies we received and are still receiving,” Lüders told physicsworld.com.

You still have time to get searching for those figurines to bag a prize. Sadly, the lucky winners won’t get to visit CERN, instead they will have to make do with their pick from the CERN holiday gift guide, which features an umbrella, tumbler and a CERN notebook.

Update 04/02/14: CERN has now released details of where the minifigures were hiding. Did you manage to find them all?