The World's Greatest Wagers
Everything Everywhere Daily
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The Importance of Wagers in Science
In 1684, Christopher Wren issued a challenge for anyone to prove Kepler's laws of planetary motion using the inverse square law. Isaac Newton applied himself to the problem and solved it several years later. Leland Stanford bet $25,000 that at some point all four legs of a horse were off the ground when it was running in 1872. Stephen Hawking made bets on X-ray source Cygnus X-1; he conceded this one in 1990 while conceding another in 1997 about information loss in black holes.
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