Homer Simpson, yes, stupid and dimwitted Homer Simpson, almost predicted the mass of the elusive God Particle or the Higgs Boson 14 years before it was discovered by European scientists.
In a 1998 episode of the long-running hit TV show, The Simpsons, titled "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace," a mid-life crisis inspires Homer to become an inventor and a genius, it turns out.
One scene features him at a blackboard working on an equation to calculate the mass of a Higgs boson. The Higgs is key to understanding why objects in the universe have mass.
It explains why some fundamental particles have mass even though the symmetries controlling their interactions should require them to be massless. It also answers several other long-standing puzzles in physics such as the reason the weak force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force.
According to author Simon Singh, that equation on the blackboard predicted 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," Singh told The Daily Telegraph.
David Kaplan, a particle physicist at Johns Hopkins University, said Homer's equation yields a value of 777 gigaelectronvolts or GeV. The actual value measured at the Large Hadron Collider is more like 125 GeV, plus or minus a GeV.
"It is a bit off, but not insanely so," Kaplan said.
Even so, 777 GeV wasn't that far off back in 1998. At that time, the upper limit was thought to be around 850 GeV.
David Cohen, the episode's script writer, said he came up with those equations after he contacted his high school buddy, David Schiminovich, an astronomer from Columbia University.
The equation on Homer's blackboard is largely based on Schiminovich's work that predicted the mass of the Higgs boson particle denoted H0.