  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. 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 4th 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.
