Fears that the world might end because of a grand scientific experiment that begins on Wednesday have given way to something less urgent: Stephen Hawking may lose $100, or gain a Nobel Prize.

Those stakes are tied to the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to rev up for the first time on Wednesday at roughly 3:30 a.m. Eastern time following 13 years of planning, $8 billion in spending and immeasurable anticipation, chronicled by Dennis Overbye of The New York Times.

Dr. Hawking will be one of the many physicists watching in hopes of greeting answers to some of physics’ biggest questions when experimental data starts to stream from the collider. But he also has a dog in this fight. His 1974 theory on black holes could be experimentally proven — if the collider succeeds in creating black holes in the first place.

“If the L.H.C. were to produce little black holes, I don’t think there’s any doubt I would get a Nobel prize, if they showed the properties I predict,” Dr. Hawking told BBC Radio today. “However, I think the probability that the L.H.C. has enough energy to create black holes is less than 1 percent, so I’m not holding my breath.”

While some doomsayers feared that the world would be swallowed up if the collider succeeded in creating a black hole, Dr. Hawking said today that the new device was “absolutely safe.” His own theory has a lot to do with his conclusion, as Mr. Overbye wrote in April:

Most theorists will say the version of their theory that predicts black holes is extremely unlikely — though not impossible. But the chance that such a black hole would not instantly evaporate according to a theory famously propounded by Stephen Hawking in 1974 is even more weirdly unlikely, the theorists say.

Dr. Hawking’s theory is just one of many that will be tested by the collider, which is designed to circulate streams of protons around a 17-mile circular track buried below Switzerland and France and, by crossing streams running in opposite directions, produce collisions that illuminate particle physics in ways that are otherwise impossible to observe and measure.

One major hope for the collider is that it could establish whether the Higgs particle really exists, a goal that Dr. Hawking said ought to be well within the capabilities of the experiment, unlike his black holes. From an Agence France-Presse transcription of his remarks:

“The L.H.C. 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 dollars that we won’t find the Higgs.”

That he was betting against such a discovery demonstrated once again the limitless curiosity of Dr. Hawking. “”Whatever the L.H.C. finds, or fails to find,” he said, “the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe.”

But is that worth the billions spent on the project? For anyone itching to post a comment to the contrary, consider the blistering argument of Dr. Hawking, who defended the collider and the space program at once.

“Together they cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP,” he said. “If the human race can not afford this, then it doesn’t deserve the epithet ‘human.’ ”