Why bet?

In brief: I just don't believe that the Higgs makes sense. And I am also convinced that the > 3 billion Euros spent for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will not lead to something really exciting, but another giant toy has been built because there was a lack of good ideas in theoretical physics.

This is a controversial issue which may be discussed for month. In such cases, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant recommended a bet - see My $100 offer and Place your bet for details.

However, I learned from books like Constructing Quarks und Nobel Dreams that the history of particle physics is full of examples where poorly understood signals were declared as new particles - unfortunately, one can't exclude that possibility for the Higgs either, especially if you consider that for its detection a one trillion times stronger, identical signal has been removed as background. Not to mention that the ultimate proof for the Higgs is a decay into two photons - as almost all particle-antiparticla-pairs do. It's a fairy-tale story that anyone can explain the nature of mass by this.

By the way, other stuff like mini black holes nobody would risk a cent. On other fantastic stuff like mini black holes nobody would risk a cent. And there isn't the slightest hint on supersymmetry yet, even if theoreticians squeeze out to higher energies. What about a bet on that?