Most people have heard of the legendary Higgs boson, also known as the God particle, by now, which was formally discovered in 2013 by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. But perhaps not nearly as many people realize that Homer Simpson came up with a pretty close prediction on his own popular cartoon show all the way back in the 1990s.
During a 1998 episode of “The Simpsons” titled “The WIzard of Evergreen Terrace,” Homer is depicted as going through a mid-life crisis that causes him to seek out bigger answers in life — and Dr. Simon Singh, a British popular science author who specializes in mathematics, says his equation is very similar to what could be expected for the “God particle,” which is considered to be an elementary particle that helps fill in the gaps for modern physics, according to an ABC New reports.
Homer becomes an inventor in the episode and at one point draws an equation on a blackboard that is very intriguing, according to Dr. Singh. In fact, “if you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson” that’s only slightly larger than the Higgs boson actually was, a full 14 years before its official discovery, the report states.
But before you give bumbling oaf Homer Simpson all the credit for his discovery, you should know that scientists have long theorized about the existence of the Higgs boson, and that many of the writers on the Simpsons were math geeks themselves.
People first hypothesized about the existence of the Higgs boson all the way back in the 1960s. It was named after Peter Higgs, who used the idea of the particle to propose an answer to the intriguing question of how some particles get mass. Five decades later, CERN’s Large Hardon Collider provided convincing evidence of the Higgs boson’s exitence for the first time.
The Higgs boson is considered by scientists to be an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics that helps explain why there are some particles that have mass even though everything around them suggests that they should not have mass.
