Fr Joe Borg (‘Quotes and news’, The Sunday Times, July 15) quoted Fr Gabriele Gionti as having said that the discovery of the ‘god particle’ should not detract from belief in God.

It seems that the use of the word ‘god’ when referring to the particle linked to the origin of mass discovery which has led to so much jubilation by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern had nothing to do with belief in God – and thus religion – at all.

According to an article in the Financial Times (July 7/8) this particle was originally known as the ‘Higgs particle’ or ‘Higgs boson’ after Prof. Higgs of Edinburgh University. However, in 1993 US physicist Leon Lederman renamed it the ‘goddamn particle’ in reference to how difficult it was to find. Coincidentally, Prof. Lederman published a book at the time and his publisher abbreviated the phrase to ‘god particle’.

Although a capital letter was not used for the letter ‘g’ it seems obvious that the idea was to give the particle a religious aspect, by linking it to the creation of the Universe by God.

The decision to resort to the use of the word ‘god’ had the disapproval of other physicists, including Prof. Higgs himself. They all criticised the public relations of this tag.