Submission + - Homer Simpson Nearly Calculates Higgs Boson 14 years Before its Actual Discovery (latimes.com) 1
operator_error writes: In the episode, titled “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” a mid-life crisis inspires Homer to become an inventor in the mold of Thomas Edison. One scene features him at a blackboard working on an equation to calculate the mass of a Higgs boson, the elusive subatomic particle that is key to understanding why objects in the universe have mass in the first place. (You can see a picture of the blackboard here.)
Simon Singh, a science writer with a doctorate in particle physics, crunched Homer’s numbers and declared that the usually hapless Homer got his math pretty much right.
“That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson” Singh 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.”
Well, not exactly.
According to David Kaplan, a bona fide particle physicist at Johns Hopkins University, 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.
Homer would have done even better if he hadn’t made pi the first term in his equation, Kaplan added. Without it, he’d have had “a nice guess of 99 GeV, which would not have been too shabby,” he said.
Even so, 777 GeV was not outside the realm of possibility back in 1998 – at that time, the upper limit was thought to be around 850 GeV. Still, those in the know were already seeing evidence that the true mass of the Higgs was significantly lower, Kaplan explained.
The fourth line of Homer's equation appears to show how a doughnut can evolve into a spherical body that vaguely resembles the moon.
Simon Singh, a science writer with a doctorate in particle physics, crunched Homer’s numbers and declared that the usually hapless Homer got his math pretty much right.
“That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson” Singh 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.”
Well, not exactly.
According to David Kaplan, a bona fide particle physicist at Johns Hopkins University, 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.
Homer would have done even better if he hadn’t made pi the first term in his equation, Kaplan added. Without it, he’d have had “a nice guess of 99 GeV, which would not have been too shabby,” he said.
Even so, 777 GeV was not outside the realm of possibility back in 1998 – at that time, the upper limit was thought to be around 850 GeV. Still, those in the know were already seeing evidence that the true mass of the Higgs was significantly lower, Kaplan explained.
The fourth line of Homer's equation appears to show how a doughnut can evolve into a spherical body that vaguely resembles the moon.
