WHEN Ladbrokes teamed up with New Scientist magazine in August last year to offer odds on five great breakthroughs being made by 2010, it looked like a typical silly-season stunt.

It is now expected to become a very expensive one. As soon as the book opened, physicists began to put their money where their theories were and backed themselves to find gravitational waves — ripples in space and time predicted by Albert Einstein but not yet proven to exist.

Alan Watson, of the University of Leeds, was astounded to see odds of 500-1 on a discovery that he considered a matter of when, not if, and promptly wagered £50.

So many other scientists did likewise that by lunchtime Professor Jim Hough, of the University of Glasgow, who leads a team seeking the waves, was allowed to stake only £25 at odds that had fallen to 100-1. When his colleague Sheila Rowan placed her bet in the early afternoon, the odds were down to 5-1, and when the book was closed they were 2-1.

Ladbrokes is bracing itself for payouts of more than £150,000 — £25,000 to Professor Watson alone — as researchers have switched on an experiment that promises to prove the existence of gravitational waves as early as next year.

If they succeed, the reward for Professor Hough could be even greater than the £2,500 he stands to win from the bookies: he would also become a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize for Physics, and a share of 10 million Swedish kronor (£730,000).

It’s nice to see the bookies beaten once in a while. You have to wonder, though, if the writers at New Scientist set them up?