Infamous gambling spree

Years ago, Hawking famous ly placed a bet against University of Michigan physicist Gordon Kane, insisting that the Higgs Boson would not be be discovered.

The prize: $ 100. Speaking on April 2013 at Caltech’s Beck man Auditorium, the famed cosmologist publicly conceded defeat in his bet that the Higgs boson — the infamous God Particle — would never be discovered.

In 1975, Hawking bet his friend and colleague Kip Thorne that a dark star known as Cygnus X- 1 would turn out not to be a black hole.

If Hawking were correct, he would win a subscription to Penthouse magazine.

If he were wrong, and Cygnus X- 1 indeed turned out to be a black hole, he would give Thorne a subscription to the somewhat less racy Private Eye magazine. Thorne won. The good news, however, was the existence of the black hole validated much of Hawking’s research, so he kind of hedged his bet.

After losing the 1975 bet to Thorne, Hawking seems to have taken an “if you can’t beat ’ em, join ’ em” approach. He teamed up with Thorne to make a wager with John Preskill. The bet involved an apparent contradiction between black holes, quantum physics and the nature of information. The bet: an encyclopedia of the winner’s choosing.

Hawking conceded the bet and eventually bought Preskill a copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia.