Ian Sample's excellent summary of the almost 50 years' research that led to this week's announcement by Cern of the discovery of a new particle, which looked and smelled like the long-awaited Higgs boson, was careful to attempt to give credit to all those who predicted the new particle in the 1960s (Report, 5 July). But even though he mentioned the "gang of six": Higgs, Kibble, Brout, Englert, Guralnik and Hagen, there were others. Phil Anderson first discussed the generation of mass for photons and similar "gauge" particles in 1962, but he has already won a Nobel prize. Not so well known was the work of two Soviet physicists, Sasha Migdal and Sasha Polyakov, carried out totally independently in 1965. They submitted a paper to a Soviet journal but the referee refused to accept it for publication. At least nowadays, online publication is possible without interference from referees.

Norman Dombey

Professor emeritus of theoretical physics, University of Sussex

Illustration by Gillian Blease

• "A prophet is not without honour except in his own country." Not surprising then, given the British press's mealy mouthed acknowledgment of Prof Higgs's achievement, that we must turn to a Frenchman for a first proper salute to the Britishness of Higgs's triumph. Yan Pascal Tortelier, conducting the RNCM Symphony Orchestra in Manchester on Thursday, invited the audience to share in the performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets as a celebration of Higgs's work as something truly great to come out of Britain. Tortelier lit up that auditorium with the elan of a Higgs boson particle.

Pauline Eyre

Skipton, North Yorkshire

• Prof Chaudhuri is unnecessarily bitter (The gods of the particles, 4 July). In the physics profession, Bose's name is well known and deeply respected. It is just a quirk of publicity that the Higgs boson has gained public notoriety. Why does this have the name Higgs when Englert, Brout, Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble also contributed? How many people know that the quark is a fermion, named for Enrico Fermi and the particle that obeys different statistics from bosons? Is it just because an editor, so the story goes, changed the name goddam particle to God particle, plus good PR by various labs, that this boson has gained fame? There are many bosons – the particle of light, the photon being the most important to us mortals. Respect is earned by achievement and Bose has a great deal. Fame is often achieved by accident, as Hadley Freeman and Marina Hyde inform us so often.

David Wolfe

Emeritus professor of physics, University of New Mexico

• So now we know, all the particles in the newborn universe were massless and wandered around at the speed of light, until one trillionth of a second after the big bang, the Higgs field was turned on. But what interests me, is what happened before the big bang. Did, one trillionth of a second earlier, God say: let there be light.

John Owen

Caerphilly

• A trillionth of a second is indeed a relatively long time interval (Letters, 6 July) when compared with the universally accepted shortest time interval: the gap between New York traffic lights turning green and the cabbie in the car behind you sounding his horn.

Bob Epton

Briggs, Lincolnshire

• The fact that the Higgs boson endows all other matter with mass is great news for those of us inflicted with sigma 5 waistlines. May I suggest that attention is now focused on the search for the ultimate mass loss programme: a Higgs boson diet which, coupled with the Higgs boson exercise regime, would be a great leap forward. However, the thought of having to run at high speed around a 26km circuit does take the edge off the prospect.

Bob Ryan

Chippenham, Wiltshire

• Perhaps, after all this, Lewis Carroll got there first. The last line in Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark is: "For the snark was a Boojum, you see!" For Boojum read boson.

Diana Brooks

London

• The discovery of the Higgs boson is a triumph. It will inspire thousands of youngsters to studies in science and engineering, youngsters who will make the great scientific discoveries of the future.

But many of these bright young things will not achieve their full potential because they won't be inspired to do their school work and may later arrive in industry without a practical feel for how things work.

When I was a kid I built Meccano gadgets, balsawood aircraft, ingenious gizmos from transistors and even home-built a microscope using lightbulbs for lenses. Devising practical scientific projects or inventions inspired me to take seriously otherwise dry studies in maths and science: I knew I needed to have that school knowledge to do the projects. And the act of devising them gave me an innovative mindset.

I use that mindset and practical know-how to this day, working as an engineer in industry and as a professor tutoring students and writing books. I even helped to uncover another fundamental particle of nature, the gluon. So, teachers, parents and grandparents of Britain: our green and pleasant land needs science clubs and well-equipped sheds for kids.

Prof Neil A Downie

Odiham, Hampshire

• It is surely reasonable to ask, in the light of evolutionary adaptation, whether the human brain has an infinite capacity for comprehension or whether we are in some sense bound by the narrow windows of time and place that shaped our cognitive faculties. The concept of the one trillionth of a second after the big bang in which an entity came into being and gave substance to all other entities is fascinating. Yet the language is intensely metaphorical as though we are linguistically struggling with things which are, literally, beyond our ken. This is not to denigrate theoretic physics but rather to ask if their are limits beyond those which Homo sapiens' reasoning cannot go, and perhaps we should turn our attention to the immediate task of eliminating all human suffering where science can do this.

Dr Ian Flintoff

Oxford

• The headline shrieks "..changes the way we see the universe for ever". How does it do that? This observation is consistent with the standard model, which sounds like the existing orthodoxy. It is wonderful engineering, but hardly a revolutionary discovery.

Richard Spragg

High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire

• Run that by me once more. Something predicted decades ago and built into the mainstream standard model of particle physics for almost as long is confirmed by a well-trailed experiment. In what way does this "change the way we see the world"? I assume someone has used the strap line prepared in case the Higgs boson was found not to exist.

Phil Wells

Hadleigh, Suffolk