Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

[Kal]

Yeah i know but i thought i would throw in all the different "reasons" they are doing this.
The real one, which is trying to find the Higgs particle, is probably not going to happen. Also i'd like to add that i found out about 4 weeks ago that Stephen Hawkings bet $100 to the scientists in charge that they would not find the Higgs particle (also known as God's Particle). I don't know about you but if the worlds smartest man bet against my favor, i would abandon all hope of achieving my goal.

He's just speculating. His opinion is no better than anyone else's. There's no reason for him to suspect that it doesn't exist.

And I don't see why he's "the world's smartest man." He's been wrong about things before. He's not perfect.

 

[Archangel]

I was just going to say, I know there was another bet he made that he lost...

Don't get me wrong, though - the man is fucking crazy brilliant.

Here's two entries from wikipedia:

In 1975, cosmologist Stephen Hawking bet fellow cosmologist Kip Thorne a subscription to Penthouse magazine for Thorne against four years of Private Eye for him that Cygnus X-1 would turn out not to be a black hole. It was, so Hawking lost. It has been said that Hawking hoped to lose the bet, since so much of his own work depended upon the existence of black holes. For Hawking, then, the bet was a type of hedge.

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 is: "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 is an encyclopedia of the winner's choice, from which "information can be recovered at will". Hawking conceded the bet in 2004. See also: Thorne Hawking Preskill bet