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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."
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?
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
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
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.
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
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.
this is obviously a troll... thoese couldnt be the odds that longhorn woudl have no security issues in the first month after its release because the odds of longhorn even being released by 2010 are 5000000000:1
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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
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
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!
(And the Higgs found first will almost certainly be the lightest Higgs, since they'll be scaling energy up rather than starting off full steam ahead. The LEP pretty much eliminated any chance of Higgs under 130 GeV, and Tevatron has pushed that envelope up another good bit.)
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ("Ulysses", Tennyson)
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.
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.
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?"
:)
I've just added you to my friends list.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.