All Bets Are Off ... Maybe

If you want to bet on a horse race over here, Ladbrokes the bookmakers is most people's choice. If you want to discover gravitational waves, physicists swear by the US based Ligo project.

Gambling and science have very little in common. So it's a reasonable bet things will go wrong if you put them together.

Here's what actually happened: Ladbrokes is always on the lookout for new ways of parting punters from their money. They are currently taking bets on the outcome of the your Presidential election. You can get very good odds on Mickey Mouse winning. And you never know...... But they've also developed a new line in implausible scientific discoveries. Ladbrokes are among the best in the business when it comes to assessing horses, but they don't know a blind thing about science. So they enlisted Britain's New Scientist magazine.

Could there be life on Titan, Saturn's largest moon? Probably not, said New Scientist. Which is why Ladbrokes will give you wildly generous odds of 10,000 to one.

They weren't quite so sure about the discovery of gravitational waves, so they pitched the odds at 500 to one. And then the trouble started. All of a sudden there was serious betting. Big money gushed in - particularly from America. Ladbrokes slashed the odds to 100 to one. But that didn't stop it. So the bookmakers did some homework. The biggest stakes were from coming from physicists attached to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory project. White-coated boffins from Massachusetts and California were busy cashing in. This was a scientific sting.

The odds are now down to 25 to one. But experts reckon that's still well worth a gamble. Ladbrokes could get badly hit. Next time they're sticking to horses.

By Ed Boyle