If you haven’t had a good laugh this holiday weekend, read this brief story from the Scientific American’s blog (hat-tip, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit). Writer Clara Moskowitz interviews astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics. Schmidt’s grandmother wanted to see the prize — that is, the actual gold medal, and so Schmidt, like a good grandson, flew to her home in Fargo, N.D. Moskowitz quotes him as follows:
“You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays — it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.
“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
“I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
“They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
“I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
“So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
“I said, ‘gold.’
“And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’
“‘The King of Sweden.’
“‘Why did he give this to you?’
“‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’
“At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”
Thanks to Brian Schmidt, Clara Moskowitz and Glenn Reynolds for the best laugh I’ve had in some time. And of course it’s news you can use if you ever have to shepherd a Nobel Prize through airport security.
