Forgive me if I’ve told this story before. When I was eight, my grandfather gave me a gift: a brick-sized object, transparent, with what appeared to be a $100 bill inside. It was an illusion, he told me. Some kind of hologram or special effect to make it look like the money was there. It wasn’t, he assured me.
I didn’t believe him, or more accurately I believed my eyes more. There was a $100 bill inside the block. There had to be. I ran this question past my sisters and a half-dozen neighborhood kids. The consensus held: the $100 had to be real.