Sir, – I’m delighted to see Frank McNally taking such enjoyment in the language of particle physics, from Joyce’s quarks through the debonair chi_c family to the unintended caprice of my scientific abstract (An Irishman’s Diary, October 19th). The Irishman’s celebration behind those words, however, must come from the fact that it was a team of eight Irish PhD students who produced these results using data from the Large Hadron Collider, and the theory being tested comes from another Irish physicist, James Stirling, head of the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge.
Mr McNally will no doubt be amused to know that the computer simulation which James devised is called SuperCHIC. – Yours, etc,