1) Theorem is true (pays out when there’s a proof/disproof, a lot of people have strong opinions about this before there is a proof).
2) Theorem will be proved/disproved before T (pays out at T, )
3) This proof will be validated by this body (pays out when they publish their analysis)
4) Research into this topic will yield a proof of theorem before T.

This latter seems like a very good basis to run maths departments on. You find the research area the market says is most fruitful for your pet theorem, fire grad students at it, then collect the proofs.

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What are you talking about? Special relativity has a lot of experimental consequences, all particle accelerators wouldn’t work if not for special relativity. Not to mention time dilation was even measured directly, with a very accurate clock in an airplane.

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You didn’t answer my question. You just said exactly the same thing as James. Since my question followed his comment, I clearly don’t care about his fantasies.

Calling a reasonable argument-from-incentives a “fantasy” seems a little off.

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Send me to prison – okay, I’ll go.
Fines – I won’t pay. (See: prison, sending to)
Give me a free gun – I’ll stick it in the locked garden shed. If that gives you usable results, then cut out the middleman and just put a big cache of guns in a government owned depot (now, what are those places called again?)

Though such laws have been tried before; a succession of English kings imposed laws about archery practice, especially as people began to prefer playing games to practicing shooting bows, ending with Henry VIII who in 1515 passed a law requiring men to regularly practice archery on pain of fines.

Seeing as how, despite all the preceding laws which imposed fines and banned other sports, it was necessary to keep passing new laws to force the populace to purchase arms and practice with them, I think we can see that a “own a gun” law mightn’t tell you what you want to know after all (does gun ownership have an effect on reducing crime?) You might end up spending more time and effort bringing people to court for fines and chasing up the die-hards refusing to buy or use guns, and that would drive up your crime figures.

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And, apart from the Pope*, I don’t accept that anyone or anything is infallible. I think (and this is only personal impressions gleaned from whatever I’ve read in the general media) that their use in actuality is more as a tool to chivvy confessions out of suspects; the police put on an elaborate kabuki of “Okay, you take this test and it will prove you are lying and you are going down the river for fifty years. On the other hand, co-operate with us, cut a deal, and you’ll be out in five.”

Changes in galvanic skin response, stress patterns in the voice and all the rest of it can be down to other things than being a liar; very nervous people, people with particular physical or mental illnesses, people who wouldn’t blink an eye at lying about cutting their granny’s throat if they were caught on live TV doing it, and drugs/mediation techniques/the kind of fudging Clark Kent did to dodge the question “Are you Superman?” would all, I submit, knock the results off.

The cops are as fallible as anyone else, and faced with a suspect they’re convinced is guilty, I don’t think they’d stick at using vague or ambiguous results from such tests to bolster a case.

But I’m probably biased by cases such as the Birmingham Six, where the forensic evidence was ‘massaged’ to give the ‘right’ results; the tests were inconclusive for the presence of nitro-glycerine, the cops came back to the scientist and as much as said “We know these guys did it but without corroboration they’ll walk free, run the tests again okay?” and he fiddled around with the settings and parameters until hey, traces of explosives definitely found!

*Within the limits of the charism as defined; no pope can, for instance, infallibly declare that the cashew is the official nut of Catholicism.

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Listening to people complain about hedge funds has never contributed anything to my understanding of the world.

You asked a question, I answered it. Don’t get snotty. Do you really think that all the talent diverted to Wall Street has discovered *nothing*, that all the trade secrets of the hedge funds are completely useless to the outside world? That seems like a tough row to hoe.

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