Indian astrophysicist wins wager

An Indian astrophysicist has just won a scientific wager, adding his name to a list of celebrated scientists like Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking who took part in such academic gambles in the past.

 
Thanu Padmanabhan, distinguished professor at the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune won the bet on a theory related to 'dark energy' that he suggested at a conference 10 years ago.
 
The challenge was accepted by David Wiltshire, a physics professor in the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
 
The fun part of the bet was the objects that the loser promised to give to the winner. The text of the bet says that in case Padmanabhan wins, Wiltshire will have to buy him a lamp of his choice “to help him better illuminate his calculations of the darkness of the Universe”.
 
But if this is not the case, then Padmanabhan was to purchase for Wiltshire a clock of his choice “to help him keep better track of the lack of constancy of cosmological ideas!”
 
On Thursday, Wiltshire told the world that he conceded the bet and paid for a lamp which is adorning Padmanabhan’s home at Pune. He made the announcement at a physics conference in Sydney.
 
The bet has a monetary value of about $200 but the pride gained for the Indian astrophysics community is immense as the 59 year old Indian scientist joined a long list of famous scientists who participated in such academic gambling in the past.
 
One of most famous scientific wagers was the Thorne–Hawking–Preskill bet on the outcome of the black hole information paradox made in 1997 by physics theorists Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking on the one side and John Preskill on the other.
 
In 2004, Hawking announced that he was conceding the bet, and he provided Preskill with a copy of Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia.
 
The wheelchair-bound British physicist is associated with several wagers. In 1975, he put a bet with Thorne for a subscription to Penthouse magazine for Thorne against four years of Private Eye for him if a star named Cygnus X-1 would turn out not to be a black hole. In 1990, Hawking acknowledged that he had lost the bet.
 
Padmanabhan came up with the wager while giving a talk about 'cosmological constant' in Texas in 2006. “I was confident about my theory and proposed the bet. Out of 200 scientists present at the conference, only one accepted the challenge,” he told Deccan Herald.
 
Through his research he was convinced that the answer to the mystery of the dark energy is what is known as the cosmological constant – an idea proposed and later discarded by Albert Einstein. Many physicists were opposed to the idea then.