New Scientist features an article on the bookmaker Ladbrokes who are taking bets on the next major scientific breakthrough to be achieved by the year 2010. Bets will be taken on 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.
They put the odds of the discovery of gravitational waves at 500-1 but Jim Hough at the University of Glasgow is confident that his project the LIGO detector will catch a gravitational wave before 2010. “I would have put the odds between 2-1 and 10-1” he said.
Tags: science
