LONDON ~ Renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has bet US$100 that a mega-experiment this week will not find an elusive particle seen as a holy grail of cosmic science.

In the most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was switched on on Wednesday, and will accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light before smashing them together.

“The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle,” Hawking told BBC radio.

“I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won’t find the Higgs,” added Hawking, whose books, including A Brief History of Time, have sought to popularize study of stellar physics.

Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass. In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle.