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Odds-on Science
utopia27 writes "According to article in New Scientist, a UK-based bookie will be taking bets for two weeks on major science benchmarks (specifically, odds of implementation by 2010). The ponies are life on Titan, 10,000:1,
gravitational waves, 500:1,
the Higgs boson, 6:1,
cosmic ray origins, 4:1,
and nuclear fusion, 100:1."
We can easily achieve nuclear fusion. The problem is controlling and sustaining it. It should read, "Fusion power plants, 100:1", not "Nuclear fusion, 100:1."
where do I bet?
As the article is already crunched, is this the same British firm who was allowing you to vote about life on Mars?
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96331
I'm tired of bombing the universe
Actually, the link in the summary is wrong. Here's the actual article.
Find out by 2010? That's a loser of a bet. Unless Huygens crashes into a Titanian Giraffe, we won't know anything definitive by 2010. It took Cassini 7 years to get there, and 2010 is only 6 years away...
Moo.
I believe the saying was "The lottery is just a tax on people who can't do math."
Betting on the greatest unsolved problems in the universe is no longer the preserve of academic superstars such as Stephen Hawking. From Thursday anyone will be able to place bets on whether the biggest physics experiments in the world will come good before 2010.
For two weeks, British-based bookmaker Ladbrokes is opening a book on five separate discoveries: life on Titan, gravitational waves, the Higgs boson, cosmic ray origins and nuclear fusion.
"We've taken bets on life on Mars before," says Warren Lush, Ladbrokes' novelty bets expert, "and we wanted to provide something completely different." The initiative follows an approach from New Scientist, and the full 10-page feature, Monsters of the Universe appears in the print edition of the magazine.
Bookies' odds are not straightforward probabilities. They also take into account how much the company can afford to lose in case they have to pay out. For example, Ladbrokes reckon the odds of finding the Loch Ness monster alive and well are 66-1, so anyone betting $1 would win $66 if it turned up.
But these apparently low odds reflect the fact that thousands of people have placed bets on Nessie, rather than the likelihood of the monster's existence. To work out the odds on the physics experiments, Lush consulted physicists and astronomers. He expects "the odds will spark debates".
Cosmic rays
Ladbrokes say the most likely conundrum to be cracked is the origin of cosmic rays - high-energy particles from outer space which continuously bombard Earth. No one is certain where they come from or what gives them energies 10 million times greater than the most powerful man-made particle accelerator.
Working on the problem are physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina. Utilising 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, it has been running since January 2004. Ladbrokes are offering 4-1 that the mystery will be solved by 2010.
They are also giving good odds on a successful hunt for the missing Higgs boson which, particle physicists believe, is responsible for giving everything in the subatomic world its mass. And it is one of the key reasons for building the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC should be complete by 2007 and Ladbrokes put the odds of finding the Higgs before 2010 at 6-1.
"I'd be tempted to take a bet on the Higgs at 6-1," says Brian Foster who heads the particle physics group at the University of Oxford in the UK. "I've been quite instrumental in betting the taxpayers' money on us finding it, so I'd better put my money where my mouth is."
Power bet
Ladbrokes are more bullish about the chances of nuclear fusion becoming a commercial reality than most physicists. The bookie reckons the odds of a fusion power station turning on by 2010 are 100-1. Meanwhile, physicists are still wrangling over where to build ITER, the first fusion reaction designed to churn out 10 times more power than it guzzles.
Serious betters might want to take a 500-1 punt on the LIGO detectors finding gravitational waves - tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by colliding black holes and massive imploding stars.
"I will certainly have a flutter," says Jim Hough at the University of Glasgow in the UK and a member of the LIGO team. He is confident that LIGO will catch a gravitational wave before 2010. "I would have put the odds between 2-1 and 10-1."
According to Ladbrokes, the rank outsider is the Cassini spacecraft, currently orbiting Saturn. On Christmas Day, Cassini will release the wok-shaped Huygens probe on a 20-day journey towards Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Ladbrokes has set the odds of finding intelligent life on Titan by 2010 at 10,00
Typically betters to the hard work, the bookie, just sets his odds so that an equal amount is bet both for and against the uncertainty. He generally gets a cut of the pot, and that's where the money comes from. If you were to make a particularly large bet, the odds would move against you to add money to the other side of the bet. If there is a ceiling on the maximum odds the best bet is likely that there is no life on Titan, although the no Nessie bet (66:1) by 2010 appears to be another good one (too much sentemental money driving the odds down. The trick to this sort of betting isn't betting on the most likely winner, its finding a something that's actual odds are far removed from the bookie odds. Similar to the Belmont, so many people bed on Smarty Jones, that the odds were greatly in your favor to play the field (a much more likely outcome than the betting odds were quoting). Anyone who did made out like a bandit, on the back of all the sentimental money for Smarty to win the triple crown.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Stalk Steven Hawking, bet what he bets.
This isn't necessarily a good idea: Hawking backs down on black holes (last section)
He's like Feynman - someone who is quite smart, shows off a hell lot but is just another smart physicist
Feynman used to use this very fact to show off, joking that winning a Nobel Prize was nothing really remarkable, but to win a Nobel Prize with an IQ of only 120, now that was a remarkable feat.
There are two ways of betting. The "proper", fixed odds way, and pool betting (sometimes known as tote or pari-mutuel).
Proper, english betting markets are formed by a bookmaker evaluating the probabilities of a selection winning an event. He will then write, say, 6/1 on a big blackboard. If lots of customers think this is a good price, they will all stick lots of money on it. "Oh, poo-pants", thinks the bookie, and cuts the price to 11/2, then 5/1. The customers that have already placed bets have 6/1, but future customers will get 5/1. Under this system, a bookie can, and frequently does, lose thousands on individual events.
The second way, which I believe is frequently used in the US (in the UK, pool betting is run as the Tote by the government under a monopoly), is pool betting. Say there are two selections, A and B. If £1000 gets staked on A and £100 on B, then A will have odds of 9/1 (or 10.00 if you're american) and B will have odds of 1/10 (or 1.1). In this method the bookie will never lose money, but isn't actually making any books!
Anti-flame barrier - I know I've over simplified, but I've tried to be concise.
I thought the Titan bet was a great deal until I RTFA and found out it's intelligent life on Titan. I think I'll pass.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
First off, Fusion does NOT cause mushroom clouds, melt down, or increase gravity. That is movie theatrics.
Last I read in mid 1990's, a magnetic fusion reactor at a university was able to be sustained for well over a week powering the entire university and selling power to the grid for a profit.
I guest they mean in the slashdotted article having a fusion reactor running for a year. Problem with fusion is that it takes massive pressure to sustain the fusion reaction. Once pressure and heat are gone, the fusion reaction instantly stops. Things happen, so it is very difficult to sustain the necessary pressure and heat for fusion reactors to stay operational for more than a month at a time.
There are two popular methods for attempting fusion.
Option 1) A focused magnetic field (tokamak design) that focuses a magnetic field (10 times earth's magnetic field) to compress hydrogen into helium. Problem is it takes LOTS of energy to start and maintain the reaction.
Option 2) A ringed-gyro-laser is used to hit a small hydrogen pellot (located in the middle). Cheaper than option-1 but requires very powerful lasers, hydrogen pellots that consistantly land on target, good timing, and ACCURATE shooting.
I probably should dust off a paper I wrote on the topic 9-10 years ago and republish it.
I'm a structural engineer and have designed enough in steel to be able to comment intelligently.
Steel becomes too weak to be relied upon for structural restrain under fire loading. The normal range of temperatures (hot days, cold days etc) will induce deflections that may cause changes in the stress distribution through the building but it will not affect the steel strength.
The normal way to deal with structural steel under fire loading is to encase it in something else that retards the heating of the steel, paint it in an intumescent paint that will swell up and provide a level of protection.
The main WTC would not have stood up with any fire protection system - the fire was so far larger than the design fires as to make it meaningless. I don't know about damage to, or the nature of the fire protection systems to the smaller WTC buildings.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
No, the H-Bomb was fusion. It was set off by a fission bomb, which heated the massive H-Bomb up enough to cause fusion, which ignited the bomb. It was called the Hydrogen Bomb because it did just that--fused hydrogen.
The origin of cosmic rays is actually pretty well understood...well, up to about 10^15 electron volts, anyway. Cosmic rays less energetic than this were almost certainly accelerated in shocks in expanding supernova remnants. A cosmic ray can pretty freely pass through the shock front, but will be reflected magnetic mirrors both before and after the shock. Every time the cosmic ray is reflected, it gains a little momentum until the shock either dies away or the cosmic ray manages to escape. The cosmic rays from supernovae are still confined to the galaxy. The real mystery are the ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), which are more energetic than 10^15 electron volts. Past this energy, the spectrum of cosmic rays steepen, and it isn't thought that shock fronts from supernovae are able to accelerate particles this fast. They might be caused by shocks from galaxies moving in the intergalactic medium...but this is where the mystery is. But whatever UHECRs' source, the magic number is about 16 megaparsecs (galaxies are 1-ish Mpc apart). If cosmic rays are more energetic than about 10^20 or so electron volts, then they will interact with cosmic ray photons in what's known as the GZK effect. So, cosmic rays with this much energy have to be from something relatively local in the universe...but probably not from our galaxy because the magnetic field of our galaxy isn't strong enough to confine UHECRs.
British bookies famously paid out on a long-term moon landing bet. Seem to remember something about a father betting on his son's Olympic medal winning chances too, though I can't find that one through Google.