In its twenty-six season run, The Simpsons' dalliances with video games and high art have been well documented. But one physicist has taken it upon himself to document the show’s intricate relationship with mathematics with "The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets,” which has already led to one significant discovery: The Simpsons proved the Higgs Boson mass theory in 1998, way before scientists did.
The physicist/ author Dr. Simon Singh told the Independent he saw the solution for Higgs Boson, a.k.a. “God particle” mass, on a blackboard in the 1998 episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace.” In the episode, Homer tries to emulate Thomas Edison and becomes an inventor—and apparently an inadvertent whiz mathematician.
Singh said, "If you work it [the equation] 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."
The Higgs Boson is an elementary particle that helps explain why other particles in the universe have mass. The theory hypothesized that all subatomic particles interact within an energy field, which in turn gives them mass. It was first predicted in 1964 by Professor Peter Higgs and five other physicists, but it wasn't until 2013 that scientists discovered proof of the Higgs Boson in a $13 billion experiment.
Dr. Singh was driven to write his book since he says math is heavily embedded in the Simpsons DNA, which makes sense since many Simpsons writers are math whizzes themselves.
It wouldn't be the first time The Simpsons predicted the future. Way back when the show predicted the outcome of last year's Super Bowl match up between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos.
[via Daily Mail]
