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.”

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:03 AM  |