The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has completed construction of a full-size, operational replica of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Stockholm harbor, sinking a cubic kilometer of instrumented ice into the Baltic seabed so that physicist Francis Halzen may receive his Nobel medal at the exact depth where his neutrinos are typically detected.
The replica, built over eleven months by a crew of two hundred carpenters, refrigeration engineers and former whalers, required the relocation of the Vasa Museum's parking facility and the temporary closure of the harbor's northern shipping lane. Academy officials confirmed that the medal ceremony will take place at a depth of two thousand four hundred meters, with Halzen descending in a pressurized diving bell accompanied by a notary and a brass band playing the Swedish national anthem through hydrophones.
«We simply could not hand a neutrino prize to a man standing on dry land,» said academy spokesman Björn Lindqvist. «It would have been an insult to the particle. The laureate will collect his medal where the neutrinos live, and he will like it.»
The academy has additionally ruled that all future physics laureates must henceforth receive their awards inside a working replica of their own experiment. Construction has already begun on a scale model of the Large Hadron Collider beneath the streets of Gamla Stan, and the chemistry committee has been observed measuring the Royal Palace for a replica of a catalytic converter.