Sir

The readable and entertaining Words article “Coming to Terms” by J. L. Heilbron (Nature 415, 585; 2002) on scientific nomenclature is amusing, but potentially misleading as far as it concerns high-energy physics. It may be true that the first flippant names such as 'quark' and 'gluon' were bestowed by US researchers, but they have monopolized neither the discoveries nor the follies.

The inspirationally named gluon — the elementary particle carrying the force that 'glues' quarks together — was discovered at Germany's high-energy accelerator centre, DESY, in Hamburg in 1979, and the more prosaically named 'intermediate boson' was discovered at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, in Geneva in 1983.

Less seriously, I plead guilty to coining TOE as a non-anatomical acronym for Theory of Everything in an article that appeared in Nature (323, 595–598; 1986). As for Grand Unified Theories or GUTs, the term was coined by my CERN collaborators Andrzej Buras (Polish/German), Mary K. Gaillard (American/French), Dimitri Nanopoulos (Greek) and myself (British). But we did not have the 'guts' to put the acronym in our paper on this subject (Nucl. Phys. B 135, 66; 1978) — instead, we weaselled out and used the equally non-anatomical GUM for Grand Unification Mass. To the best of my knowledge, GUTs were first spilled, metaphorically, by Dimitri Nanopoulos in a paper (Harvard Preprint HUTP-78/A062) published later in 1978.

As well as making discoveries, we Europeans can be just as facetious, jocular and capricious as our US friends.