A new book investigating the maths in The Simpsons has revealed something ridiculously awesome and completely unexpected - in the 1998 episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”, Homer comes up with a mathematical equation that predicts the mass of the Higgs boson more than a decade before physicists at CERN discovered it.Why, you ask? Well if you don’t remember the episode, Homer suddenly becomes an inventor, coming up with such devices as an electric hammer and a make-up gun. In the process, he unleashes his hidden mathematical ability, predicting the mass of the Higgs boson to be 775 giga-electron-volts (GeV). British science writer and author of The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets, Simon Singh, says in the scheme of things, that figure isn’t actually that far off the 125 GeV estimate that was the result of the CERN Higgs boson discovery in 2012.
A new book investigating the maths in The Simpsons has revealed something ridiculously awesome and completely unexpected - in the 1998 episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”, Homer comes up with a mathematical equation that predicts the mass of the Higgs boson more than a decade before physicists at CERN discovered it.
Why, you ask? Well if you don’t remember the episode, Homer suddenly becomes an inventor, coming up with such devices as an electric hammer and a make-up gun. In the process, he unleashes his hidden mathematical ability, predicting the mass of the Higgs boson to be 775 giga-electron-volts (GeV). British science writer and author of The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets, Simon Singh, says in the scheme of things, that figure isn’t actually that far off the 125 GeV estimate that was the result of the CERN Higgs boson discovery in 2012.
