The Simpsons and their mathematical secrets
The Simpsons is famously a cartoon full of surprises and forecasts that are unbelievable. Among these, one of the most fascinating and unexpected is pitted by Simon Singh in his 2013 book "The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets". In the 1998 episode, "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace," Homer presents a mathematical equation predicting the mass of the Higgs boson a full 14 years before CERN physicists discovered it. In the episode Homer suddenly becomes an inventor, creating devices such as an electric hammer and a make-up gun. In the process, he unleashes his hidden mathematical prowess by predicting that the mass of the Higgs boson will be 777 gigaelectron volts (GeV). This value is actually "not that far from" the estimate of 125 GeV, the result of the actual experimental discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012. Homer made this prediction more than a decade before the actual discovery, how ...