Orion Crest, Series_1

Chapter 74: Gamble

　　The discovery of the pentaquark state particle was indeed an exciting news for the entire theoretical physics community.

　　For Frank Wilczek, however, he has not been in the best of moods lately. Of course, his good mood was not spoiled by the hadron collider, but because of a six-year-old bet.

　　Six years ago, at a physics conference in the Azores, he had made a bet with a gentleman named Garrett Lisi.

　　Mr. Lisi, who had got an invitation from somewhere, stood up and messed up while he was talking about the Standard Model, insisting that supersymmetric particles don't exist because you can't find them at all, while Mr. Frank, naturally, was a staunch defender of theoretical physics and predicted that the Hadron Collider (LHC) would detect supersymmetric particles within six years!

　　Then they made a bet in front of everyone. The arbiter of that bet was the host of that conference at the time, MIT professor Max Tegmark. And the bet, was $1000.

　　Now, six years on, the LHC has finally managed to raise the energy to 13 TeV after the restart of the experiment on 3 June. but even with the discovery of the pentaquark state particle, there is still no sign of a supersymmetric particle.

　　Although the Standard Model was once again correctly tested, it was of no use, and he still lost this bet.

　　As for the reason, he overestimated the capability of CERN and was also too optimistic about the performance of the upgraded LHC.

　　In fact, in the physics world, betting is not an uncommon thing. And for Frank Wilczek himself, this is not his first bet.

　　In 2005, he bet with Janet Conrad, a "beautiful scientist" at MIT, that the LHC would detect the Higgs particle, while the latter believed that the LHC could not.

　　The stakes were gold chocolate coins served at the Nobel Prize ceremony, and the result was obvious: Frank won the bet and received 10 gold chocolate coins.

　　Only this time it seems he was not so lucky, and he was unfortunate to lose the bet.

　　In fact, winning or losing is nothing, for these scholars, betting is at best a spice after work.

　　But the problem was, the person he bet with, Mr. Garrett Lisi, this guy was not an easy target.

　　Firstly, Mr. Lisi is not a physicist at all, but a PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles.

　　Secondly, the biggest "achievement" of this PhD in philosophy is to use the Lie group E8 structure, which has only recently been analysed by mathematicians, to construct the legendary Grand Unification Theorem and to predict more than 20 particles. ......

　　Einstein's unfinished work has been a treasure chased by theoretical physicists. Yet it is clear that it is not only theoretical physicists who covet this treasure, but also countless laymen who know nothing about physics.

　　Although Garrett Lisi's mathematical theory, which incorporates philosophical ideas, is scoffed at by both mathematicians and physicists, it is quite marketable in some places, and even a book has been published.

　　That's precisely why it would be embarrassing for Wilczek, a physics Nobel Prize winner, to lose the bet.

　　While he was honest enough on his personal Twitter account to admit that he lost and honour the $1,000 gentleman's agreement, it's clear that he wasn't as honest in his heart as he appeared to be on his social media platforms.

　　It's not the $1,000 thing, it's the fact that Lisi has been taking it to people online all day long. A lot of people have been teasing him about it lately and it's just embarrassing!