TV - Movies
The Simpsons
Episode That
Came Close To A
Major Scientific
Breakthrough
By HELEN A. LEE
Over the course of 33 seasons of “The Simpsons,” the show has gained a reputation both for its cleverness and its apparent ability to predict the future. Along with foreshadowing the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidency of Donald Trump, “The Simpsons” seemingly discovered a major scientific breakthrough more than a decade before it was found in real life.
In the 1998 episode "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace," Homer Simpson writes several equations on the board in an attempt to become an inventor, with the first equation referring to the Higgs-Boson particle. His guess of the particle’s size, 775 giga-electron-volts, was only a bit larger than the actual mass was found to be 14 years later.
This predilection for math in “The Simpsons” is no accident, as two of the writers, Mike Reiss and Al Jean, were devotees of mathematics and continued to hire mathematicians after they were promoted to executive producers. The math in this particular episode was introduced by writer David S. Cohen and likely based on the work of astronomer David Schiminovich.