I’ve always thought Homer was less dumb and more of an idiot-savant like character. Turns out, my hunch was not far off from the truth.
In the 1998 episode, “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”, Homer wrote an equation to calculate the mass of the Higgs Boson. Either a point of it being a complete coincidence, or one of the writer’s being the smartest man alive, the equation turned out to be correct, fourteen years later.
“A lot of the writers on The Simpsons are mathematicians,” said Simon Singh, author of The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets.
“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.”
Next thing you know, Homer will discover the formula to create donuts out of thin air.