I’m always on the lookout for ways to make money off of my esoteric physics knowledge. Here’s one: you can bet on the chance that a big physics experiment will discover something by a certain date. Inspired by an article in New Scientist<\/a> on large physics experiments, Ladbrokes<\/a> betting agency is placing odds on various possibilities<\/a>, and taking cash bets up until Sept. 6th. The four bets up there now are: LIGO<\/a> discovering gravitational waves by 2010 at 2-1; understanding the origin of cosmic rays<\/a> (presumably they mean ultra-high-energy cosmic rays) by 2010 also at 2-1; discovery of the Higgs boson<\/a> by the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider<\/a> by 2010 at 3-1; and completion of a working fusion power station by 2010 at 40-1. Personally I would happily wager 100 pounds to win 300 on the Higgs being discovered, although I’m not sure what happens if the CMS experiment finds it rather than ATLAS. A fusion power plant is very unlikely. I don’t know what counts as “understanding” cosmic rays, so I’d be a little leery of that one. LIGO finding gravitational waves by 2010 is a trickier one — everybody things gravitational waves are out there, so the bet depends more on the technological progress (and funding) of the observatory, which is hard to predict.
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I’m always on the lookout for ways to make money off of my esoteric physics knowledge. Here’s one: you can bet on the chance that a big physics experiment will discover something by a certain date. Inspired by an article in New Scientist on large physics experiments, Ladbrokes betting agency is placing odds on various […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}