Marshall Barnes Declares Winning Higgs Boson Bet A Victory For The Buckeye State

July 17, 2012 - PRLog -- Friday June 13, Marshall Barnes attended the Wake-Up and Start-Up event at the Ohio State University Technology Commercialization and Knowledge Transfer Center in Columbus, Ohio and announced that he had made sure that Ohio had a piece of the bet against Stephen Hawking. The event leader and Wake-Up and Start-Up mentor, Mike Figliuolo, had begun the meeting by mentioning the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson particle. The Higgs Boson is the particle that was theorized to give all other particles mass. It has been referred to by some as "the God particle", although scientists vehemently dissuade people from the use of that term to describe it. Stephen Hawking had announced in 2008 that he'd bet $100 that it would not be found by the CERN research center with the Large Hadron Collider.

Marshall had written Hawking, and his assistant, that he would take Hawking up on that bet and raise him by $900, but when Hawking didn't respond, Marshall issued a press release so that his acceptance would be on the record http://www.prlog.org/10118485-stephen-hawking-bets-agains...  . On July 4th, scientists at CERN announced that they had the data that seemed to indicate that the Higgs Boson had been detected and Stephen Hawking announced that he had lost $100, but to Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2012/07/stephen_hawki... . Hawking never publicly mentioned that bet with Kane, which was made in 2000, until recently. Michigan and Ohio have had a long standing rivalry dating back to the 1800s when the two states almost went to war over territory. Currently the rivalry centers around the Ohio State University and the University of Michigan.

When Figliuolo announced the Higgs discovery and wondered aloud if it would result in warp drive, Marshall, who has been researching warp drive physics since 2000, spoke up from the second row that it wouldn't and then announced that he had won the bet with Hawking, along with Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan".

"Did you mention the 'M' word here?", Figliuolo asked aghast in fake horror.

"Yeah," Marshall replied, but quickly added, "that's where Gordon Kane is from, but I won the bet too - it's on record on the Internet http://www.prlog.org/11914207-higgs-boson-announcement-sh... , so Ohio can have dibs on that as well. I kept us in the game"

"Go Bucks!" he added.

"OK," Figliuolo responded, in genuine relief.