Homer Simpson Figured Out Higgs Boson Years Before Real Physicists
Maybe donuts and Duff Beer are the secret to mathematical brilliance.
It turns out “Simpsons” patriarch Homer Simpson came very close to predicting the mass of the Higgs boson, a particle first theorized to exist in the 1960’s, but only truly discovered in 2012.
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In “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” a 1998 episode of the long-running Fox series, Homer experiences a mid-life crisis and sets out to emulate the work of inventor Thomas Edison. During this process, he is seen working out a series of complex equations on a blackboard. According to physicist Simon Singh, the equations are those used to predict the mass of the Higgs particle.
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“If you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson that’s only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is,” Singh said in a recent interview. “It’s kind of amazing as Homer makes this prediction 14 years before it was discovered.”
“The Simpsons” apparently has a strong reputation for incorporating high-level mathematics, which is the subject of Singh’s new book, “‘The Simpsons’ and Their Mathematical Secrets.”
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