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).

Such a discovery would open a new window on the Universe, allowing scientists to use gravitational waves to observe astronomical features that have never been seen directly before. The biggest prize would be a glimpse of the dawn of the Universe after the big bang, perhaps even of its first few seconds.

At present the first 300,000 years of time and space are opaque to conventional telescopes that use the electromagnetic spectrum but it will be possible to see much farther back with gravity wave observatories. "Up until now we have been seeing the Universe, but not hearing it," Bernard Schutz, a physicist from the University of Cardiff, said. "Now we will be able to hear it too, and listening to the Universe will allow us to understand it in a totally different way."

Four vast detectors of the Ligo (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) collaboration, three in the United States and one in Germany, are beginning a systematic 18-month hunt.

Yesterday the first two, in Hanford, Washington, started searching for gravitational waves produced by cataclysmic events such as supernova explosions and collisions between neutron stars and black holes.

On November 14 they will be joined by another Ligo facility in Livingston, Louisiana. The final piece in the jigsaw is the Anglo-German Geo600 experiment, laid out in a field of Brussels sprouts and sugar beet near Hanover, which will add its observations from early next year.

Gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity 90 years ago, are ripples that deform space and time, squeezing and expanding matter to an almost imperceptible degree as they pass. Professor Hough said: "The ripples cause strains in space, pulling things apart and pushing them back together."

However, the waves are extremely weak, so that even those generated by the most powerful events are difficult to pick up on Earth. Over the distance between Earth and Alpha Centuri — 4.3 light years — a gravity wave would warp space by as little as the thickness of a human hair.

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