Did ‘The Simpsons’ predict the mass of the Higgs boson 14 years before scientists?
The Simpson have been on TV for over three decades and in that time things that have happened on the show have been known to become a reality.
‘The Simpsons’ have been on television since 1987, appearing first as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show on Fox. Those were spun off into a full fledge animated sitcom that is now in its 35th season.
During that long run its creators have entertained audiences with the show’s satirical commentary on society. The show has also managed to have uncanny foresight of the world to come.
Did ‘The Simpsons’ predict the mass of the Higgs boson 14 years before scientists?
The year was 1998, and ‘The Simpsons’ was in its 10th season. In episode two, titled ‘The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace’, Homer, going through a midlife crisis, decides to become an inventor on the scale of Thomas Edison. At one point during the episode he is working out a complicated mathematical equation on a blackboard.
“That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson,” says Simon Singh, author of the book ‘The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets’. If you solve the equation “you get the mass of a Higgs boson that’s only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is.”
The episode aired 14 years before scientists at CERN in Switzerland were able to discover the elementary particle using the Large Hadron Collider. It had been proposed to explain why certain particles have mass by six theorists including François Englert and Peter Higgs in 1964. Peter Higgs, for whom the Higgs boson is named, passed away on April 9, 2024.
Other predictions on The Simpsons that became a reality
‘The Simpsons’ have also been credited with prophesizing events in politics, sports and technological advances.
Perhaps most famously the ascension of Trump to the White House in episode 17 of season 11, ‘Bart to the Future’, broadcast in the year 2000. Al Jean, the current showrunner and executive producer of ‘The Simpsons’, pointed out that the show also predicted Trump would run again in 2024 is a short put out in 2015 ‘Trumptastic Voyage’ when Homer gets sucked into the then-candidate’s hair when riding down the escalator behind Trump.
In sports, it could be said that ‘The Simpsons’ correctly guessed who would win the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The episode, ‘You Don’t Want to Live Like a Referee,’ which aired before the competition, ends with a major win for Germany, which happened to be the team that actually won the competition that summer.
‘The Simpsons’ seem to have their pulse on the future of technology as well. In the episode ‘Lisa’s Wedding,’ which aired in 1995, Marge and Lisa speak through a video calling device, and later a smartwatch appears. In February, their predictive skills were hailed again with the unveiling of the Apple Vision Pro which seemed eerily similar to a device that causing chaos in Springfield in the episode ‘Friends and Family’.
Former writer and producer Bill Oakley told Reuters in a 2020 interview that “in general when people say The Simpsons has predicted something, it is just that we were satirizing real life events from years before and because history keeps repeating it just SEEMS like we were predicting things.”