The stupidest, stupidest, most idiotic of men – and there are many of them in the race – is also one of the most intelligent. Weird ? Actually, not so much. Over the years, with its breathtakingly precise predictions – like the presidency of Donald Trump or, in another register, the arrival of automatic correction, the series The Simpsons has continued to surprise. Time and again, Matt Groening's crazy fiction has transcended the small screen to resonate in our reality. And this since the broadcast of its first episode in 1989. Nine years later, the episode entitled Homer's Last Invention, or The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace, was broadcast. In it, Homer Simpson goes through an existential crisis which leads him to dream of being an inventor like Thomas Edison. At the turn of a scene, he stands in front of a blackboard covered with seemingly absurd equations. But, one of these formulas roughly predicts the mass of the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle that explains why objects have mass. But how to explain it?
Simon Singh, physicist and author of the book The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, analyzed this scene. “If you calculate this equation, it gives a mass for the Higgs boson slightly higher than its true value. It's incredible that Homer came up with this estimate 14 years before CERN confirmed his discovery,” he told The Independent in 2015, first (…)
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