A bet about detecting the origins of the universe is at the centre of a good-natured disagreement between Stephen Hawking and Canadian physicist Neil Turok

via Guardian Science
Stephen Hawking claims victory in gravitational wave bet
www.theguardian.com
Cosmologist says he has won the wager with a Canadian physicist about what happened in first moments after big bangAccording to the Big Bang theory, the expansion of the observable universe began with the explosion of a single particle at a definite point in time. This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest. The theory, accepted by nearly all astronomers today, was a radical departure from scientific orthodoxy in the 1930s. Many astronomers at the time were still uncomfortable with the idea that the universe is expanding. That the entire observable universe of galaxies began with a bang seemed preposterous.