A new book on maths in "The Simpsons" reveals Homer Simpson almost determined the mass of God particle, the Higgs boson, more than a decade before scientists discovered it.
The book, titled "The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets", has been written by Dr Simon Singh who stated the complicated equation was shown in an episode that was aired in 1998. In the episode, "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace", Homer decides to become an inventor and in one shot, he is seen standing in front of the blackboard working on the equation.
"That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson. 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. It's kind of amazing as Homer makes this prediction 14 years before it was discovered," The Telegraph quoted Singh as saying.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN discovered the Higgs boson years later.
"The equation is a playful combination of various fundamental parameters, namely the Planck constant, the gravitational constant, and the speed of light. If you look up these numbers and plug them into the equation, it predicts a mass of 775 giga-electron-volts (GeV), which is not unreasonably higher than the 125 GeV estimate that emerged when the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012," Singh said, according to Daily Mail.
During a literary festival, the author had said that writers with interest in maths work on the show. The series has been featuring a lot of math in its episodes, but the viewers don't really think much of it.
"The Simpsons is the most mathematical TV show on prime-time television in history. A lot of the writers on The Simpsons are mathematicians," he said.
The author further said that the first full episode of the comedy series, there was a joke about calculus. Singh added there was a "tonne of maths" in "The Simpsons", which once also referred to Fermat's last theorem, perfect numbers, mersenne primes and narcissistic numbers.
