Nobel Prize Winner Talks About Getting Hassled by TSA

The Nobel Prize winners have all been
announced, and in the shadow of this an interesting story has
emerged about one previous winner’s encounter with the
Transportation Security Agency (TSA).

Astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, 2011 Nobel Physics Prize winner
for co-discovering dark energy,
told Scientific American about getting hassled by the
TSA for his medal:

“There are a couple of bizarre things that happen. 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.

“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?'”

Read some more Reason coverage of this year’s
Nobel Prizes
here,
here, and
here. Read about the TSA’s recent sordid activities
like spilling an urn and
trying to search a guy after he got off a plane.