A scientific wager is a wager whose outcome is settled by scientific method. It typically consists of an offer to pay a certain sum of money on the scientific proof or disproof of some currently-uncertain statement. Some wagers have specific date restrictions for collection, but many are open. Wagers occasionally exert a powerful galvanizing effect on society and the scientific community.
In 1870, Alfred Russel Wallace bet a flat-Earth theorist named John Hampden that he could prove the flat Earth hypothesis incorrect. The sum staked was £500 (equivalent to £51,000 in 2019).[1] A test (now known as the Bedford Level experiment) involving a stretch of the Old Bedford River, in Norfolk, was agreed on: Wallace measured the curvature of the canal's surface using two markers separated by about 5 km (3 mi) and suspended at equal heights above the water's surface. Using a telescope mounted 5 km from one of the markers, Wallace established that the nearer one appeared to be the higher of the two. An independent referee agreed that this showed the Earth's surface to curve away from the telescope, and so Wallace won his money. However, Hampden never accepted the result and made increasingly unpleasant threats to Wallace.
In 1975, cosmologistStephen Hawking bet fellow cosmologist Kip Thorne a subscription to Penthouse for Thorne against four years of Private Eye for him that Cygnus X-1 would turn out to not be a black hole. In 1990, Hawking acknowledged that he had lost the bet. Hawking's explanation for his position was that if black holes did not actually exist much of his research would be incorrect, but at least he would have the consolation of winning the bet.[2]
In 1997, Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne made a bet with John Preskill on the ultimate resolution of the apparent contradiction between Hawking radiation resulting in loss of information, and a requirement of quantum mechanics that information cannot be destroyed. Hawking and Thorne bet that information must be lost in a black hole; Preskill bet that it must not. The formal wager was: "When an initial pure quantum state undergoes gravitational collapse to form a black hole, the final state at the end of black hole evaporation will always be a pure quantum state". The stake was an encyclopaedia of the winner's choice, from which "information can be recovered at will".[4] Hawking conceded the bet in 2004, giving a baseball encyclopaedia to John Preskill. Thorne has not formally conceded. See: Thorne-Hawking-Preskill bet
In 2000 roughly 40 physicists made a bet about the existence of supersymmetry, to be settled in 2011, but because the Large Hadron Collider was delayed the bet was extended to 2016. As of Summer 2016 there had been no signs of superparticles, and the losers delivered "good cognac at a price not less than $100" each to the winners (equivalent to $120 in 2022).[5][3]
In 2000, Steven Austad and Jay Olshansky bet US$150 (equivalent to $250 in 2022)[3] each on whether anyone born before 2001 will reach the age of 150. They later increased the bet to $300 (equivalent to $370 in 2022)[3] each. The pot is invested in a fund, and could be worth several hundred million dollars by 2150.[6]
In 2005, British climate scientistJames Annan proposed bets with global warming denialists concerning whether future temperatures will increase. Two Russian solar physicists, Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, accepted the wager of US$10,000 (equivalent to $14,000 in 2022)[10] that the average global temperature during 2012–2017 would be lower than during 1998–2003.[11] The bet ended in 2017 with a win to Annan. Mashnich and Bashkirtsev did not honour the bet.[12] Previously, Annan first directly challenged Richard Lindzen. Lindzen had been willing to bet that global temperatures would drop over the next 20 years. Annan says that Lindzen wanted odds of 50–1 against falling temperatures. Lindzen, however, says that he asked for 2–1 odds against a temperature rise of over 0.4 °C.[13] Annan and other proponents of global warming state they have challenged other denialists to bets over global warming that were not accepted,[14] including Annan's attempt in 2005 to accept a bet that had been offered by Patrick Michaels in 1998 that temperatures would be cooler after ten years.[15] Annan made a bet in 2011 with Doctor David Whitehouse that the Met Office temperature would set a new annual record by the end of the year. Annan was declared to have lost on January 13, 2012.[16]
On July 8, 2009, at a FQXi conference in the Azores, Antony Garrett Lisi made a public bet with Frank Wilczek that superparticles would not be detected by July 8, 2015.[18] On August 16, 2016, after agreeing to a one-year delay to allow for more data collection from the Large Hadron Collider, Frank Wilczek conceded the superparticle bet to Lisi.[19]
In 2016 David Gross lost a wager about supersymmetry, but he continues to believe in the theory.[5]
In 2017, Daniel J. Bernstein made a bet for US$2,048 (equivalent to $2,400 in 2022)[10] with Francisco Rodríguez-Henríquez that quantum computers will publicly break the RSA-2048 factoring challenge no later than 2033.[22] In 2023, John Preuß Mattsson bet $2,050 that the challenge will withstand quantum computing until at least 2050. Daniel J. Bernstein, John Sahhar, Daniel Apon, and Michele Mosca accepted the bet.[23]
The efforts of photographer Eadweard Muybridge to capture the motion of a galloping horse were not part of a wager, contrary to popular opinion.
Millennium Prize problems – Seven mathematical problems with a US$1 million prize for each solutionPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
Pascal's wager is not a wager in the sense used in this article, nor is it scientific.
^"More or Less, High Speed 2 and Executive Pay". BBC. 2011-01-13. Retrieved 2012-01-13. Tim Harford ... resolves a four year-old bet on climate change between climate scientist James Annan and astrophysicist David Whitehouse