Wagers in Science: Physicists Do Play Dice

There are lots of reasons to undertake a scientific investigation. Sometimes it’s pure and simple curiosity. Sometimes it’s a directed effort to solve a specific problem. Often it’s pure curiosity that gets dressed up as a directed effort while writing a grant application. Sometimes it’s trying to solve one specific problem and accidentally solving another. Sometimes it’s an effort to make Star Trek real. And sometimes it’s because of a bet. It’s the wagers in science that we’re looking at today.

Isaac Newton

Kepler’s third law of planetary motion describes the relationship between the period of a planet’s orbit and the longest diameter of the elliptical orbit (this discovery also being the subject of a bet). This led people to suspect a relationship between distance and the strength of gravity. Unfortunately, no one could figure out exactly why. This lack of certainty apparently annoyed astronomer Charles Wren enough to put his money where his mouth is. He bet the scientific community as a whole forty shillings that no one could figure it out within the span of two months.

Edmund Halley (the guy the comet is named after) figured Newton was the sort of fellow who could solve this problem. And indeed, Newton told him he’d done so some time ago but had misplaced the notes, proving the importance of keeping a good notebook. Unable to locate the original derivation, he redid it from scratch, resulting in him sending the solution to Halley after the deadline for the wager had expired.

Something about the new derivation quite excited Newton, because he didn’t stop there. He set his chemical experiments aside for months while he pondered the motion problem at greater length. The resulting manuscript, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (called simply the Principia most of the time because physicist have work to do) laid the foundation for classical mechanics. Or as it’s sometimes known, most of what is covered in a high school physics class.

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking has made quite a number of bets on scientific outcomes. The first example is when he bet Kip Thorne at Caltech that investigation of an X-Ray source known as Cygnus X-1 would not reveal it to be a black hole. This was a bit of a strange thing to wager, as at the time black holes were still theoretical and much of Hawking’s research hinged on them being real. So when his hypothesis proved correct and it was a black hole, he had to buy his fellow physicist a year’s subscription to Penthouse.

He seems to be particularly fond of making bets with Thorne. They’ve also wagered on whether the singularity at the centre of a black hole can exist independently and whether information is capable of escaping a black hole. In both cases, Hawking conceded, losing $100 and a sports almanac.

At this point, it seems that Hawking betting against something is a good way to ensure that it actually happens. When the Large Hadron Collider was finally up and running, Hawking thought it would be much more interesting if they didn’t find the Higgs Boson and bet Gordon Kane that they wouldn’t. However, CERN did locate it and so it will be a while yet before we have to completely rewrite our understanding of physics.

He did claim victory on a bet with Neil Turok from Canada’s Perimeter institute over the existence of gravitational waves. Observing this waves is evidence that the universe has been expanding since its inception. However, Turok is still not keen to actually concede. Though who can blame him? It would be embarassing to be the first person to lose a science bet with Hawking at this point.

Nanotechnology

There is a saying these days that “nano” is an ancient Greek word meaning “funding”. Nanotechnology is an incredibly exciting area of science. And the entire field dates back to a wager. In 1959, a few years before Richard Feynmann wont the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics, he gave a talk where he dreamed of a future where computers and tools were absolutely microscopic. And then he bet the audience that they couldn’t make it happen.

The first component was an electric motor no more than 1/64 of an inch on any side. In 1960, Bill McClellan realized no one had collected on the wager yet. Feynmann was hoping for new engineering techniques, but McClellan constructed the device entirely by hand. The process involved very mundane tools, including toothpicks and microscope slides.

Ultimately, Feynmann’s dream would be achieved. No one was ready to stop miniaturization at the scale specified. Today, scientists build motors out of individual molecules.

Though it had less impact on the world at large, after winning the Nobel Prize Feynmann bet an MIT professor that he could avoid holding positions of responsibility for the next ten years. He won that one, continuing to live the dream.

Penguin Diagrams

This last example is not technically science specifically done because of a bet. But the specific name is. John Ellis lost a bet on a game of darts and thus had to include the word “penguin” in his next paper. He wasn’t quite sure how he was going to manage that while writing about quantum physics. Fortunately, staring at anything too long leads to strange thoughts. And in his case, the thought was “this Feynmann diagram looks like a penguin”. (Yes, the general category of diagram was developed by the Feynman above)

Is it any wonder that Albert Einstein commented on God playing dice with the universe? Physicists are so terribly fond of gambling.