title: The anatomy of a scientific rumor.
abstract: 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 21(st) century. In this paper 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 4(th) July 2012. 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 "rumor". We model the information spreading in the corresponding network of individuals who posted a tweet related to the Higgs boson discovery. Finally, we show that we are able to reproduce the global behavior of about 500,000 individuals with remarkable accuracy.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: De Domenico
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lima
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mougel
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Musolesi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D061108:Social Media; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis; D013997:Time Factors