Homer Simpson ‘discovered’ the Higgs boson a decade before the LHC

[Bosonic]

Homer Simpson ‘discovered’ the Higgs boson a decade before the LHC

Homer Simpson once famously asked, ‘I’m not a genius – or are I?’

It turns out he actually are.

The bald, three-fingered cartoon character actually predicted the mass of the so-called God particle, the Higgs boson, more than a decade before the Large Hadron Collider.

A new book on maths in the Simpsons by Simon Singh claims that an equation shown on the famous Simpsons blackboard in 1998 actually predicts the mass of the Higgs with some accuracy.

Dr Singh says, ‘That equation predicts 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.’

http://metro.co.uk/2015/03/02/homer-simpson-discovered-the-higgs-boson-a-decade-before-the-lhc-5084964/

[jakeXT]

1. 775 GeV ?

'If you look up these numbers and plug them into the equation, it predicts a mass of 775 giga-electron-volts (GeV), which is not unreasonably higher than the 125 GeV estimate that emerged when the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012.

'Indeed, 775 GeV was not a bad guess bearing in mind that Homer is an amateur inventor and he performed this calculation fourteen years before the physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, tracked down the elusive particle.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2975606/Did-Homer-Simpson-discover-HIGGS-BOSON-Maths-1998-episode-predicts-particle-s-mass-14-years-CERN.html

[drm604]

2. 775 strikes me as quite a bit higher than 125.

[jakeXT]

3. In 2005 Wilczek made a bet that it would be under 150 GeV because of supersymmetry

Conversations around us grew louder as the wine flowed. Many theorists thought supersymmetry had the most compelling answers to those unresolved problems, and most supersymmetric models predicted the Higgs mass to be in the narrow range of 115 to 130 GeV (a giga-electron-volt is a unit of energy or mass; 1 GeV is a bit more than a proton’s mass).

Thus a compelling argument could be made that the Higgs had to exist, that the L.H.C. would find it, and that its mass would lie in a narrow range.

Dr. Conrad knew all this, of course, but she was enjoying the intellectual fencing match. She argued simply that experiments could disprove a compelling theoretical argument.

So they made a bet. And since Dr. Wilczek had a compelling theoretical argument on his side, he was happy to give her odds of 10 to 1. If the L.H.C. finds the Higgs boson with a mass below 150 GeV, he wins 10 Nobel chocolate coins (the pinnacle of Hanukkah gelt); if not, Dr. Conrad wins 100.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/science/with-chocolate-at-stake-physicists-bet-on-whether-the-higgs-boson-will-be-found.html?_r=0