Yesterday, renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking announced that he is literally betting (to the tune of $100, or about E70) that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider won’t accomplish its primary objective of detecting the elusive Higgs Boson.
“I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won’t find the Higgs,” he said.
This marks the third, publicly-announced wager Hawking has made over a matter of science: he once wagered a year’s subscription to Penthouse that conclusive evidence of the existence of black holes would not be discovered (he has said that he is 95% sure he has already lost this bet), and in 2004 he conceded a bet with astrophysicist John Preskill over the resolution of a paradox involving the loss of information in black holes.
If Hawking is right, not only will it end his apparent losing streak, it will also “show something is wrong” with the so-called Standard Model of Physics, though he has optimistically told the BBC that “whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe.” The Higgs Boson is an as-yet hypothetical component of the Model whose role in particle physics is to confer atomic structures with mass.
One Australian news source has claimed that Hawking’s bet is that the LHC simply “won’t work,” though Hawking has stated that the LHC could instead find certain physical structures that would be “a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together.” There does not appear to be any evidence from Hawking’s own statements that he believes that the LHC “won’t work.”
The Large Hadron Collider, whose first experimental test was today (it was successful), has been under intense media scrutiny over hysteria surrounding one German physicist’s largely unsubstantiated claim that the LHC could annihilate the Earth by creating miniature black holes. At the height of this hysteria, CERN scientists were particularly annoyed to find themselves the target of a lawsuit by a group of Hawaiians who were afraid that the LHC would either eat the Earth with a black hole, or just render it a mass of inert matter via a hypothetical “strangelet.” One particularly snarky rebuttal to this charge can be found here, and further safety information about the Large Hadron Collider can be found on CERN’s website.
Joseph Lykken, theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, reminded CNN reporters that “when Columbus sails west, he thought he was going to find something. He didn’t find what he thought he was going to find, but he did find something interesting.”