Hawking Bets Collider Won't Find 'God Particle'

Sept. 9, 2008 -- Renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has bet $100 that a mega-experiment this week will not find an elusive particle seen as a holy grail of cosmic science, he said Tuesday.

In the most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be switched on Wednesday, accelerating sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light before smashing them together.

"The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle," Hawking told BBC radio.

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won't find the Higgs," added Hawking, whose books including "A Brief History of Time" have sought to popularise study of stellar physics.

On Wednesday the first protons will be injected into a 27-kilometer (16.9-mile) ring-shaped tunnel, straddling the Swiss-French border at the headquarters of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass. In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle.