Scientific American:
“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.
My question is, why didn’t they notice it when he was going to North Dakota?
It could have been lying flat or something, and the really busy airports tend to miss weird little things like that. I remember one time I unwittingly made it through LAX and Beijing’s PEK with a “swiss army card” in my wallet. Which meant I made it through two security checkpoints with a small pocket knife on me. It wasn’t until I left Taipei’s TPE on the way home that someone noticed it and I got stopped.
Wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t notice it on his way in.
I was stopped straight away here in Tassie. They laughed at it and said I could post it -pointed me to a souvenir shop for an envelope- then to a letter box just outside check-in.