Homer Simpson may have been smarter than we thought. The author on a new book about mathematics in The Simpsons claims that the hapless patriarch of America’s favorite animated family actually predicted the equation to find the mass of the Higgs boson particle in 1998.
The equation can be seen in a chalkboard during the 1998 episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” which features Homer drawing it out while trying to explain an invention.
“That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson,” Dr. Simon Singh, who wrote The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, told The Independent. “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 particle was later discovered by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in 2012.
According to The Daily Mail, the writer of “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” was David X. Cohen, whose high school friend, David Schiminovich, was an astronomer at Columbia University at the time. Schiminovich happened to be working on his own equations to predict the mass of the Higgs boson.
Singh has a Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of Cambridge, notes The Huffington Post. He’s also written several other popular science books.