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And who gave you this 24-carat gold medal worth £6,000, sir? The King of Sweden!
[DAILYMAIL.CO.UK] He won the Nobel Prize for physics. But Brian Schmidt received no special treatment from the TSA when he tried to take the 24-carat pure gold medal through airport security in Fargo, Nebraska.He was awarded the prize, made from $10,000 of gold, for co-discovering that the expansion of the universe was accelerating - a finding that has transformed our understanding of the solar system. As he tried to take it to show his grandmother, however, the revered physicist was stopped and interrogated. 'There are a couple of bizarre things that happen,' Schmidt, 47, told an audience in New York last month. 'One of the things you get when you win a Nobel Prize is, well, a Nobel Prize. 'It's about that big, that thick [he mimes a disk roughly the size of an Olympic medal], weighs a half a pound, and it's made of gold. 'When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. 'I was coming around so I decided I'd bring my Nobel Prize. '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. Posted by: Fred 2014-10-13 |
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