The Anatomy of a Scientific Gossip

How the rumours about the Higgs boson discovery spread on Twitter

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Overview

The study

The announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle at CERN will be remembered as one of the milestones of the scientific endeavor of the 21st century. We present a study of information spreading processes on Twitter before, during and after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle with the features of the elusive Higgs boson on 4th July 2012.

Results

We report evidence for non-trivial spatio-temporal patterns in user activities at individual and global level, such as tweeting, re-tweeting and replying to existing tweets. We provide a possible explanation for the observed time-varying dynamics of user activities during the spreading of this scientific gossip". We model the information spreading in the corresponding network of individuals who posted a tweet related to the Higgs boson discovery. We show that we are able to reproduce the global behavior of about 500,000 individuals with remarkable accuracy.

People Involved

From University of Birmingham:

From INSA Lyon:

  • Paul Mougel (Visiting Student)

Publications

  • M. De Domenico, A. Lima, M. Musolesi. The Anatomy of a Scientific Gossip. Submitted for Publication. Preprint available on ArXiv: arXiv:1301.2952.

Gallery

Press Coverage

Funding

This work was supported through the EPSRC Grant The Uncertainty of Identity: Linking Spatiotemporal Information Between Virtual and Real Worlds” (EP/J005266/1).

Contact

Please contact Mirco Musolesi sending an email to m.musolesi [AT] cs.bham.ac.uk