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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."
Duke Nukem Forever -- 25,000:1
(grin)
AC
Sorry! This section of Newscientist.com is unavailable at the current time - every effort is being made to get it back up and running as quickly as possible.
The ponies are life on Titan, 10,000:1
Gravitational waves, 500:1
The Higgs boson, 6:1
Cosmic ray origins, 4:1
Nuclear fusion, 100:1
The New Scientist getting a good Slashdotting: priceless
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I am reminded of a certain phrase:
The lottery is just a tax on fools.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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."
I'm putting a few bucks on Longhorn having no security issues in the first month after its release. Unfortunately, the odds are 10000000000000000000000:1.
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?
This always happens on the stories I was going to actually read.
I wonder how the calculate the odds?
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Stalk Steven Hawking, bet what he bets.
... Or just knock him down and take his winnings. Either way, Bling-Bling!
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96331
I'm tired of bombing the universe
So I can give them my money, and not worry about actually losing it until 2010! :D
Honestly, I do think it'll give some insight into which projects get the most 'play' for the average person. But I also see problems...what if 'big bossman scientist' lays out $1000 on cold fusion, and then steers his entire staff and budget into it, with no hope of success? Wasted time and years? Or just the kick in the ass they might need to actually make some progress?
10000000:1
Science is the Real TRUTH!
...and go to the bahamas by 2006:
1:1.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
He forgot the most important one:
Odds on the bookie being contactable in 6 years to pay out on all the bets he lost: 1,000,000:1
I'll take those 50:1 odds on transparent aluminum! Oh, wait, that was Monday. Darn.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
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.
Um, can't we make a sustained nuclear fusion reaction right now? I thought the only problem was setting it up in a way that it made more energy than it took to contain and cool.
This, of course, completely disregards the simple fact that there are zillions of stars that are doing it right now.
funny munging
10000000:1
My personal apologies to 10000000 slashdot readers. It is strictly numbers folks.
Good luck next time....
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
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
getting laid before 2010?
Is there a mathematical term for "when pigs fly?"
The stock markets are obviously subject to the same risk of illegal insider trading, but they are somewhat protected by stringent rules and enforcement (cf. Martha). An inside trader is basically equivalent to a wise guy, except that being an inside trader is illegal but being a wise guy isn't.
Even if their betting contract says "NASA employees and their families may not participate in the Titan bet" or whatever, scientific information (unlike business information) is generally not under any kind of non-disclosure, so Joe Astrobiologist at NASA can freely tell his buddies about the squirmy things they dug up in the ice and his buddy can freely log on and bet wildly if he wants to.
10000000:1
My personal apologies to 10000000 slashdot readers. It is strictly numbers folks.
You should apologize to the frightened-looking "1" woman at the right of the colon...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
wouldn't be a bad bet... I wasn't able to RTFA, but with the LHC going online at CERN within the next 5 years, I imagine the Higgs will be found within the decade, and that's pretty conservative. Most particle physicists are confident the Higgs exists, if only because its inconvenient failure to exist would knock most current unified theories into a cocked hat. Depending on the timeframe, 6:1 odds sounds like some fast cash!
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ("Ulysses", Tennyson)
I've got an impression from reading the article that the bookie company itself will be setting odds (and, thus, 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.).
I always though that the "proper" way to do this is to make people to bet for/against the event, odds are calculated as the ratio of $$ in those two pots. Then bookie loses nothing (and always gets his fee from both winners and losers).
Are they saying that their odds are fixed numbers and To work out the odds on the physics experiments, Lush consulted physicists and astronomers.?
Paul B.
1,000,000,000,000:1
Now your sure this isn't another Niger scam?
I've been a student of statistics long enough to realize that anything, now matter how unlikely, which can happen, eventually will.
The odds of winning a lottery are remote, yet people do. The odds of three people sitting at a table, with a half dozen raffle tickets cleaning up while everyone else gets zilch nada are pretty remote, but it happened on Tuesday (fortunately they were kind and had enough schwag so I got to walk home with 5 Fullers ESB pint glasses and a nifty bar towel, which I won on my only winning ticket.)
Careful what odds you give people, especially if you're planning to take bets.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why don't you go to tradesports.net? They have been doing this for a long time and seem to offer "services" covering the political and occasionally scientific as well.
This just seems like a total one-off scam. Tradesports seems to be a legitimate market (in Ireland, where it is located) with quite a few happy users and some scientific research on its accuracy.
However, as I'm an AC, the chances of being heard are 25000:1...
Scientology: Must make minimum bet of $100K to see odds.
Greys: You knew the odds before we wiped your memory.
ESP: You already know the odds.
The Rapture: 666-1
Creationism: See Blind Watchmaker's Odds Book
Well... the old argument again. I can hear experts telling us that "gambling is for weak minded fools with no thought of odds..." But what about this... you think your average Jack or Joe (depending on demographics) is going to place a bet on this??? I think not! The only people that will bet on this are going to be people like us... slashdotter nerds. I bet you 1:1 odds that we can beat the system. SLASHDOTTERS!!! UNITE!!! Oh yeah... by the way... someone help me place a $500 dollar bet on nuclear fusion (I'm too young to bet)!
In fact, Stephen Hawking has said that when he places a bet, he bets on exactly the opposite of what he holds to be true. This way, if is he wrong, he wins the bet, if he is right, he loses the bet. Thus, he is always a winner no matter the outcome. He wants to lose the bet(s).
ymmv
And this bookie is offering a tax on those too stupid to realize how easy it is to skip town in 9-1/2 years.
So what you are saying is that millions of people think the "excitement" of a lottery that one has next to no chance of ever winning is worth $1 or $2? Wow, it IS a tax on the stupid. Kind of like paying $8 to watch Gigli.
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.
I mean I realize were're closing in on 2005, but for some reason when I see 2010 I think to myself "10 years away".
Yes- I think it is sqrt(-1)
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
If the excitement of playing the lottery is worth more than 10 cents, then playing the lottery is a good deal. Suppose that the excitement is worth 20 cents to you. Well, 90 cents plus 20 cents is 110 cents, on a ticket that only cost you 100 cents!
The point is that in order to be able to get excited playing lottery, you have to be bad at math. Let's suppose I offer you a heads or tails game with fair 50-50 probability split for both options. If you win, I pay you $1 (one US dollar), if I win, you pay me $100 (a hundred US dollars). You won't get excited by this game - at least not in a pleasant way. You'll rather say "what kind of a crooked game is this?". The point is that all the lotteries and casino games are as much crooked as this game, but they try to hide it in complex score counting systems. This scheme works good enough for weak minds, but I for one couldn't feel any "excitement" playing a fundamentally crooked game. I can be excited playing poker with a trusted friend, when I know it's just luck and betting strategies for both of us, but there's no point of playing if I know that he has a hidden ace under the table. That's lottery for a math-savvy person.
And I suppose that for the biology savvy person, sex is only for transmitting genetic material.
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
This actually happened near where I live
sig?
No, quite the oppposite : you bet what Hawking *doesn't* bet. If you win, great. If you lose, then he wins, so *then* you knock him down. The bookie's term for this is "laying off" the bet.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
go into any bookies' and you'll find four windows for paying in, only one window for paying out.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
And yes, I'm a physicist.
So am I. Your characterization of Feynman vis-a-vis Hawking is silly, I think.
As you suggest, Hawking is indeed considered to be quite smart, but to have made contributions that haven't been that major to physics as a whole. Such concepts as the Hartle-Hawking equation, black hole evaporation, etc., have been quite interesting to people working in comparatively narrowly-defined areas; that plus their removal from unambiguous observational testing makes them at most curiosities to most of the physics community.
That's a pretty far cry from the contributions of Feynman. His work on QED, weak interactions, superfluidity, and the makeup of hadrons are each individually closely tied to experiment, and all of that work related to issues that nearly all theoretical physicists spend at least some time in their careers considering. Hell, pulling Feynman rules out of interaction Lagrangians, and using the diagrams that follow for solving perturbation expansion problems, are now staples not only of particle physics, but of solid state theory as well. He was tremendously influential. Nothing Hawking has done compares in its influence.
Your analysis on the numbers alone are correct. However, you are overlooking a signifigant aspect. Most lotteries are run by some sort of state agency, and the crooked winnings are often added to the state funds. The more people that play the lottery, the more money the state takes in.
The government has to get money somewhere for it's programs. If it isn't through lotterys it WILL be through some other form of taxation. And when was the last time that you got a tax return back from the state telling you that you had won $1 million dollars, hm?
My odds of winning are low and the payoff is 'poor', but they are better than your odds of getting money from the IRS...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
haha. Only on Slashdot could somebody be modded "Insightful" by providing a method for beating a crippled man and stealing his money. *G*
I only very occasionally play the lottery, but there is another factor. It doesn't really matter to me if it's $100 million or $50 million, it would be enough to change my life. it doesn't matter that it's only half (or a quarter or whatever) of what it would be to be "fair" - it's a large enough amount to make a big difference.
A dollar a week is worthless.
A major lottery winning in a lifetime is overwhelmingly valuable.
Factor in entertainment value and social bennefit for the proceeds, and the lottery makes sense.
... not that I play of course :-)
The only silly part is not buying all your tickets in one lump sum. With the odds against you, inflation is against you, and the money does you the most good when you're young.
I think I'll assume I'll live to ~70 or so and go out and buy 52x40 lottery tickets. I'll never have to worry about forgetting to play, and I can claim for a long while at least, that I buy a ticket every week.
the Higgs boson has two problems, with this bet. firstly, they have to find it. this can only happen if it falls within a narrow energy band *and* the detectors run well enough, sufficient luminosity is attained.
secondly the Higgs boson must actually exist. I don't know exactly how they're defining it - does it have to be exactly the boson that they're searching for, or will any boson that gives the massive particles mass via any form of symmetry breaking (like SUSY) do? it's quite possible that mass isn't arrived at via symmetry breaking anyway. perhaps the biggest reason to doubt it is, clever as Higgs's mechanism is, it can only relate to intertial mass. gravitational mass (which has a history of matching up with inertial to a remarkable degree) will need some quantum gravity thingy. now of course, we can still have a higgs boson, just as we'll still have the electron even when we build a new model for it. but we don't yet have any idea what the Higgs might look like in any of the mooted quantum-gravity GUT candidates.
nope, I'd bet against Higgs. at least, whatever your view, 6-1 are ridiculously short odds. theorists may have spent decades desperately trying to find something other than Higgs, and failing - which is why we still have Higgs. but that's not enough reason, IMHO, to give much credibility to Higgs.
Most of IF's predictive markets are based on economic benchmarks, but a month or so ago you could bet on when iTMS would sell its 100,000,000th song.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
...is only part of it for me, but I agree with you. Basically, I like my life just fine - but I easily get $5.00 of entertainment value out of my (rare) lottery ticket purchases. I've come up with some pretty wild schemes. The current winner, assuming a good-sized jackpot of $9 million:
;-)
1) Split about a third between my family and myself (well, my gf counts, too).
2) Give another third to a top-notch university in a city where I'd like to live. Two conditions: Create a world-class population institute, and give me free tuition/books/other fees etc. for life (a "Get Into School Free" card - wouldn't it be great?).
3) Distribute the rest, anonymously, into my friends' bank accounts after *somehow* surreptitiously getting their account numbers. Explain my sudden wealth by saying "Yeah, it happened to me, too - weird, innit?"
And yes, I know I probably couldn't keep part 3 secret because of all the publicity that surrounds lottery winners, but most of my friends watch as much TV as I do (exactly zero), so it might actually work. And that would be too cool!
OK, back to the grind. Feel free to mod off-topic now.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
To get excited, you have to be bad at math... or you have to have been reduced to a ad-soaked stupor by the scores of mindless lottery advertisements on the radio, TV, etc. I usually turn down the radio during the ad breaks, and even so I have half the speels about "more excitement, more action, more fun!" running though my head whenever I look at a Powerball billboard (with its ever changing running total).
.. spoken by Ray Charles, no less. I'm not sure what the saddest aspect of this is...
Or the other line that sticks with me..
"Powerball, it's America's game!"
1) Ray Charles advertised for these people practically from his deathbed
2) What the sentence itself says about Powerball
or worse
3) What the sentence itself says about America.
I'm going home now... try to ignore the Powerball billboards... but I know I'll have to read the number anyway. To anyone strapped for cash, constantly bombarded by stories about the winners, and maybe lacking a basic knowledge of the real odds.. the lottery must be a pretty addictive and frustrating thing.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
TradeSports.com allows anyone to trade futures contracts on all manner of assertions, including assertions on the coming U.S. presidential election.
Checkout this site, which displays an electoral vote projection and map based on the state-by-state contracts for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. According to the TradeSports.com/InTrade market, the U.S. presidential election is tight, with Kerry projected to win 262 EVs to Bush's 242. 32 EVs are too close to call.
- James
Please note, kids-- this is where grammar counts. See, The ponies are life on Titan ... and The ponies are: life on Titan ... convey very different meanings.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
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
9/11 was the sort of event that it is not practical to design for. Structurally it worked. The building stood up. The impact load from the plane (from a documentary i saw) was less than the deisgn level wind event, albeit focussed in one part of the building. There was no way to fire engineer that sort of event, short of a anti-aircraft missile site on the roof.
You just have to pray that you are all sorted with the almighty when that sort of thing happens
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
Buildings ARE designed to withstand airplane crashes. It works too, as was demonstrated when the Empire State Building survived having an American B-25 Bomber crash into it in 1945.
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.
From the stuff that I've heard regarding the WTC, it would have been the explosion from the initial impact that would have stripped away the insulation. Most fire cladding systems are only rated for a couple of hours. The thinking is that either sprinklers will kill the fire in the early stages so you don't get a big fire, or in a couple of hours you will have got everyone out and the fire service will have done their best.
Most fires burn in the region of 1800F (1000C). This is wood, or anything.
As far as I know, jets burn kerosene rather than diesel (would make an odd sound running a diesel jet engine)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
It is a straight forward event, and it baffles me that people would not choose the simplest explanation and would seek some "tin foil hat" explanation that has all manner of interlaced conspiracies.
For a building that has steel columns, once the columns get to about 600C (1100F), they lose all strength and would collapse.
I don't know a lot about WTC7, but the plaster board cladding systems that are typically used to protect steel columns would have been compromised just by the duration of the fire (working on typical ways that these systems are rated) burning all day. There would not need to be damage to the cladding by explosion.
You're right re collapses post earthquake. Water for fire fighting is usually compromised during an earthquake, and with the large number of building fires it isn't improbable that the fire department can't get to all fires before the building collapses.
Most high rise fires are extinguished either by sprinklers or fire fighting efforts and not left to burn themselves out.
Warehouses which are typically built with steel, collapse readily in fire, as they are usually easier to let burn down than to try to fight from inside.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
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.