“It’s not like you get advanced warning, they just sort of call you up, in my case, in the middle of cooking dinner. ‘Hello? By the way, you’ve won the Nobel Prize.’”
Australian astrophycisist Brian Schmidt (left) receives the Nobel Prize for Physics from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Swedenon Dec. 10, 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden. Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images
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.
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