Stephen Hawking bet $100 that the Higgs boson would not be found. He made the wager with physicist Gordon Kane, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding the elusive particle before the Large Hadron Collider began operating.
The Higgs boson was predicted as part of the Standard Model of particle physics. It is associated with the Higgs field, whose interaction with elementary particles helps explain why many of them have mass. Researchers at CERN announced evidence for the particle in 2012, meaning Hawking lost the bet.
The wager is often confused with Hawking’s better-known black-hole information bet involving John Preskill and Kip Thorne. That was a separate scientific dispute from 1997. Hawking also made other playful bets about black holes, including one involving the X-ray source Cygnus X-1.