7 Insanely Clever Simpsons Jokes That You Totally Missed
7. Homer Works Out The Mass Of The Higgs Boson (The Wizard Of Evergreen Terrace)
The equations on Homers chalkboard features an equation put together by David Schiminovich, one of Cohens high school friends who had taken the opposite path to his fellow mathlete and stayed in academia to become an astronomer at Columbia University. Thats all very well, but they dont give out Emmys for astronomy, do they? Anyway, the top line on the board estimates the mass of the Higgs boson (expressed as M(H0) on the board) by combining various cornerstones of elemental physics, namely the Planck constant, the gravitational constant, and the speed of light. The actual answer, if you stick all those numbers into the equation itself, is rather higher than the actual mass found by CERN (Homers equation gives us 775 giga-electron-volts rather than CERNs 125), but its not a bad punt for a man who stores his inventing notes in a tumble dryer.
