I give
I lose
I was wrong
and I will pay
There is a great, if sporadic, tradition of "bets" in astrophysics.
It is a particular tradition at Caltech, where Kip Thorne has made a series of famous public bets on science issues.
One of my great "bad moves" as a graduate student was to decline a bet with a Caltech faculty member - I had made a rash (but as it turned out intuitively correct!) scientific statement and he immediately offered to bet me on it, I felt the stakes were too high and didn't have the sense to ask for odds... so I chickened out. Silly me. Been overcompensating ever since.
Anyway, six years ago I offered a bet at the pulsars meeting at MAICh in Χania:
given current observing facilities and progress in detection of pulsar systems, that a black hole-pulsar system will be discovered by 7th February 2008; and further, that it more likely will be found in a globular cluster than in the field.
The discussion and statement can be found in PASP Conf Proc v 302, p 391-396, or astro-ph/0303312.
Well, it is now the 18th of Feb, and I concede. No need to wait for Joe or Matt to pronounce judgement.
Personally I blame Green Bank - if the foundations of the GBT hadn't cracked I might have had a chance, but they did, and from what I hear on the grapevine there is no known system in the pipeline that could rescue me in time for the Bet. For that to happen there would have to be an already discovered pulsar system with unpublished timing data showing systematic and significant timing residuals that are most plausibly explained by a black hole companion.
Ahem. Anyone want to tell me to hold off on conceding?
Didn't think so...
Not that there aren't interesting new pulsar systems in the pipeline, and some of them may even have black hole companions... but they could not be discovered to be such with any confidence in time to save me from my rash gambling.
So: Steve, Scott, Paulo - I concede.
I'll obtain a bottle of nice red, Le Cigare Volant, or equivalent, for the next gathering.
Each.
Ouch.
Then I'll have to find a higher paying position to recover my costs, or something.
Hey, if that is not a motivation to call together another pulsar workshop, I don't know what is. And if it is somewhere in the general western direction, I might get actual genuine Le Cigare Volant, rather than some overpriced french imitation!
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I look forward to sharing the bottle with you when you are next in California, or in some more exotic location. And now I guess it is safe to really start hunting for that black hole binary!
Bummer that you lost this one.
More importantly: What was the bet that you declined to take???
I opined loudly at a brown bag lunch, just before GRO launched, that the GRBs would be found to be extragalactic.
Peter G. immediately offered to take me up on that.
The stakes he proposed were unimaginably high to me as a grad student.
Interestingly, a well-known phenomenon is that Kip tends to win bets if the issue at hand is purely one of science, and tends to lose if the resolution requires people to complete a task of some kind within a given timeframe. This arguably is in the second category, so you're in good company at least.
Time to start looking for Flying Cigar on sale....
Bummer. Believe me, I would have much preferred if you had won the bet! My question for you, though, is what was special about Feb 7, 2008? You would never answer that one before....
Ah, I needed a specific date an interestingly short time in the future, so I picked the year based on pulsar discoveries and the date is my wife's birthday.
There was an older vintage of Le Cigare Volant on clearance at the state store in Altoona last week. Just FYI.
Such a pity for us that we won this bet, we look forward to drinking the wine as consolation.